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Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

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Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#21

Post by rev087 »

jamie_ca wrote: post #19
mc42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily. Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters. Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of la…

"despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype. Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.

I'm on the same boat, the only complaint being the lack of history search. And I like Discord so much that I switched our office from Hipchat to Discord, despite it being exclusively marketed towards gamers.

We have been completely happy with the switch, in special the ability to hop into voice chat with remote coworkers with one mouse click.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#22

Post by quaunaut »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17
SandersAK wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree that Discord doesn't have a functional business. They have massive growth and many many top teams, streamer personalities etc use their services. If Discord becomes a critical component to the content creators of the whole gaming ecosystem, there's going to be plenty of revenue opportunities.

As I just said, and you confirmed: Discord doesn't have a functional business. Discord currently makes no money. "Opportunites" are just that, opportunities. A lottery ticket is an opportunity, but it is not a business. Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge f…

You should check out LINE. Same business model, absolutely huge.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#24

Post by SandersAK »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17
SandersAK wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree that Discord doesn't have a functional business. They have massive growth and many many top teams, streamer personalities etc use their services. If Discord becomes a critical component to the content creators of the whole gaming ecosystem, there's going to be plenty of revenue opportunities.

As I just said, and you confirmed: Discord doesn't have a functional business. Discord currently makes no money. "Opportunites" are just that, opportunities. A lottery ticket is an opportunity, but it is not a business. Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge f…

I guess I don't know what you mean by functional business. For me they have built an incredibly valuable asset that has grown enormously and will probably continue to do so.

Amazon is another company with opportunities to make profit, but they traditionally haven't done much of that, eschewing that for just growing value.

In the years when Amazon was not turning profit, would you consider it a non-functional business?

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#25

Post by pfooti »

nacs wrote: post #2

Curse is terrible. It's like the (current) Sourceforge of gaming sites. I seriously don't know why Twitch/Amazon would consider acquiring it.

the semi-irony here is their source-project management site for addon developers is called "curseforge".

I use curse mostly to handle addons for games I play a lot (world of warcraft primarily). Every now and then, when I bump into some terrible interface on their client or bad practice by their business managers, I have wondered how much work it would be to move to an open addon publication system. If you get all the addon authors to move to a different storage platform for their actual addons like github, how much extra work would it be to build a client on top of that? The addons themselves are pretty much FOSS by definition - you can't distribute for-pay addons for WoW at least.

I imagine there'd be some scale issues, and github isn't really a distro network, but I'd bet the technical work could be done in a weekend.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#26

Post by xenihn »

goeric wrote: post #20

Discord will likely grow to the value of Twitch was at (when it was acquired by Amazon) in the next couple years, it's a really big space.

I feel this way too. I was amazed at how much better Discord is in comparison to Ventrilo and Mumble when I first used it.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#27

Post by Macha »

SandersAK wrote: post #24
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I just said, and you confirmed: Discord doesn't have a functional business. Discord currently makes no money. "Opportunites" are just that, opportunities. A lottery ticket is an opportunity, but it is not a business. Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge f…

I guess I don't know what you mean by functional business. For me they have built an incredibly valuable asset that has grown enormously and will probably continue to do so. Amazon is another company with opportunities to make profit, but they traditionally haven't done much of that, eschewing that for just growing value. In the years when Amazon was not turning profit, would you consider it a non-functional business…

I don't see how they're going to extract enough revenue to keep the lights on and pay the staff. This isn't the same as Amazon reinvesting money that would otherwise be profits.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#28

Post by larzang »

pfooti wrote: post #25
nacs wrote: post #2

Curse is terrible. It's like the (current) Sourceforge of gaming sites. I seriously don't know why Twitch/Amazon would consider acquiring it.

the semi-irony here is their source-project management site for addon developers is called "curseforge". I use curse mostly to handle addons for games I play a lot (world of warcraft primarily). Every now and then, when I bump into some terrible interface on their client or bad practice by their business managers, I have wondered how much work it would be to move to an open addon publication system. If you get all th…

CKAN, the package manager for Kerbal Space Program mods, works by having a central metadata repo that they accept pull requests against for adding metadata for new mods, and then the mods themselves are hosted on Github or SpaceDock or wherever.

It's not quite as automated as publishing a NPM or Composer package, but it's close and works well.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#29

Post by mintplant »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17
SandersAK wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree that Discord doesn't have a functional business. They have massive growth and many many top teams, streamer personalities etc use their services. If Discord becomes a critical component to the content creators of the whole gaming ecosystem, there's going to be plenty of revenue opportunities.

As I just said, and you confirmed: Discord doesn't have a functional business. Discord currently makes no money. "Opportunites" are just that, opportunities. A lottery ticket is an opportunity, but it is not a business. Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge f…

> And I have not ever seen an emoji pack for a chat service as an appealing sales item that's going to fund a startup.

You underestimate gamers as a market. Valve's built a thriving business on virtual hats. Twitch sells access to premium emotes and a wider range of username colors as a subscription upgrade. "Cosmetic purchases" are huge.

Discord could also do what Twitch does and let streamers offer recurring donation options to their fanbases, in exchange for perks like being able to talk during restricted times (eg. during large streams) and custom community-specific stickers.

Re: Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

#30

Post by Blackthorn »

nacs wrote: post #2

Curse is terrible. It's like the (current) Sourceforge of gaming sites. I seriously don't know why Twitch/Amazon would consider acquiring it.

It wasn't always this way. Curse used to be a great boon for the community and held up a number of otherwise expensive to run sites.
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