Say hi to Curse, the newest member of the Twitch family | Hacker News Reader

Say hi to Curse, the newest member of the Twitch family

blog.twitch.tv

15 pointsminimaxir9 comments

For those of you wondering "why would/did Curse make a chat app"?

A: It's a niche chat app for gamers to use while gaming, in order to communicate as a team.

From my understanding, it was meant to be a low resource alternative to skype. It's hard to play games like League when skype is eating up your resources/bandwidth/etc.

Wait, when did Curse go from an addon manager and a community around sharing mods to a Skype/Discord clone? Was it always that, or is this a relatively recent development?

It's interesting how Twitch doubling down on its 'this where gamers go' audience. I wonder what the corporate owner, Amazon, has to gain from this. It's true that gamers respond well to ads about high-margin computer parts, but do their motives go beyond ad serving to actual community building?

The Curse Voice product was being internally developed in early 2014. I believe the planning/thoughts for it were happening before then, but it has been long enough that I forgot some of the details. I would have to ping the project lead for additional clarification.

Disclaimer: I work for Curse.

Did you work in the San Francisco office? I was also a Curse employee at the time.

Nope, only in Huntsville.

I hadn't heard of Curse until somewhat recently and I was kind of surprised to find out that they had a previous incarnation as a game addon manager/community thing. Apparently they started to pivot with a VOIP/chat program about two years ago called "Curse Voice" and when things like Slack & Discord started to gather steam they put their chat app front and center and started to scale back the addon stuff.

Twitch is really a phenomenon. It provides incredibly well targeted marketing to a very large demographic (gamers) and has an amazingly good public reputation because it compensates content producers extremely well by granting them free access to a large number of revenue streams that were previously unavailable.

Personally I enjoy playing competitive Overwatch and learn a lot of technical skills from watching some of the better players who stream on Twitch. I happily turn off ad block whenever I do this because I think the players deserve it.

On a psychological level I think twitch appeals to the masses because it offers a social interaction that is missing for many gamers.

Slack, Curse, Discord, Rocket.Chat...all these new chat apps feel like clones of each other. They're all web/electron-based apps with very similar interfaces and design and they only seem to differ by maybe one or two features, if at all

I use slack at work. Apart from a few special clipboard paste types (like images and other file type sharing), the app seems to offer almost purely only written communication. Integration to other systems might be its strength (via its app directory).

By looking at "curse vs discord" feature list at the bottom of https://www.curse.com/, both curse and discord seem to have much more to offer than slack.

I had not heard of rocket.chat. By quickly looking at its features, it seems pretty similar to slack.

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