Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by Svenskunganka » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

elmigranto wrote: post #66

mintplant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 donati…

I'm not that sure about Valve. What they actually have for hats now is a system that withdrawals short of casino — you can't buy the thing you want, instead, you buy a "crate" that may (randomly) contain it, or other item. My thinking is that hats aren't that profitable without these kinds of tricks, and Steam effectively sponsored everything that happened at Valve before they implemented "gambling".

I get where you're coming from, but this is definitely not the case. Valve recently banned all gambling sites from using their APIs, so they're all shut down by now.

And if you refer to crates of random items as gambling, they've also filled in that gap with the Steam Marketplace where you can buy individual items for market-dictated prices from other Steam users, where Valve takes a portion of the money the items are sold for.

This business is extremely profitable. Looking at their game Dota 2 for example where they recently hosted the world's largest e-sports tournament, where the pricepool were completely funded by the players of Dota 2 through in-game virtual items. This pricepool were over $20,000,000 USD, funded through in-game purchases where 25% of the items price would go to the pricepool, and the rest would go to Valve. That is $60,000,000 USD that Valve profited in the span of two months, for one of their games, in one of their tournaments. Valve hosts 4 tournaments per year for this game.

Looking at the pricepool of their previous tournaments ( http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments ), we can see that this amount just keeps increasing year after year.

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

#92

Post by neaumusic » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 9:59 AM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #18

neaumusic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch has been trying to hire front end devs and they're failing at hosting anything more than a video stream. They should have acquired discord, but instead the two failing companies curse and twitch are teaming up

Can you expand upon the "failing" nature of these companies? On first sniff, I'm catching the same scent that rises from the last several decades of people proclaiming Microsoft is on the way out.

TDLR The site is riddled with glitches and they've done the bare minimum with their pipeline. They literally cannot fix their chat system, but somehow their video streaming works? That's like the first thing you learn how to make using JavaScript.. I feel like they have so little to offer, it's only a matter of time before gamer, tech-savvy, word of mouth, linking type of people use another platform where browsing for channels is easy, there are featured streams, aggregate streams, non-gaming streams, forums, profiles, private messages, and all the normal stuff you see on a website nowadays. Hacker news is yet another example of a bad front-end. Amazon and facebook are bloated, and soundcloud is in the same boat too, they literally just cannot realize what users want, and at this point the higher-ups will only focus on squeezing revenue out while the app is still relevant. Lost all startup mentality before they actually made something great. Sure it's viral but so is the "blue or yellow dress" and tons of other bs

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

#93

Post by neaumusic » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:02 AM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #18

neaumusic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch has been trying to hire front end devs and they're failing at hosting anything more than a video stream. They should have acquired discord, but instead the two failing companies curse and twitch are teaming up

Can you expand upon the "failing" nature of these companies? On first sniff, I'm catching the same scent that rises from the last several decades of people proclaiming Microsoft is on the way out.

It looks like they do have "whispering" but I still literally cannot browse the site without it crashing. I feel like users are just abusing the free bandwidth and hosting capability, similar to soundcloud and youtube

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

#94

Post by andypants » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:57 AM UTC

Ntrails wrote: post #86

leonnoel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LINE made $268 Million from just stickers last year http://qz.com/704768/line-sold-268-million-worth-of-stickers... If Discord can keep up the growth, things like stickers, emojis, and sound packs could pull in good revenue. Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch

>Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch But I have a "global twitch emote" plugin on chrome so I presume kappa will already show up for me if used in discord?

Why would a chrome plugin affect a totally separate application?

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

#95

Post by boundlessdreamz » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 11:20 AM UTC

b1naryth1ef wrote: post #34

rev087 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Discord Dev here) Awesome to hear Discords a good fit for workplace environments too, we've heard a couple success stories around remote teams swapping. Search is a huge priority for us, but its also something we wanna spend time getting right. e.g. soon!

I haven't used Discord but if it's better than Slack you are sitting on a huge opportunity. I know your focus is gamers but the market Slack is targeting is huge. Their mobile app is garbage (at least on android). Always 'reconnecting'. Doesn't keep the recent chats offline and has to always fetch it from server. Missing/delayed notifications. Desktop app on OS X is better but it too has 'connection issues'.

It looks like we will be able to use Discord when you add search. Seriously, tell the management to think about it being an alternative to Slack. We are a paying Slack customer and while they are better than hipchat/IRC, it is far from perfect.

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

#96

Post by gberger » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 11:44 AM UTC

elmigranto wrote: post #68

Trisell wrote: post #37

Twitch is dying? They had 258k+ people watching The International. There were 130k watching an EULCS quarterfinal today. And those are just a couple of streams of the thousands that are online at any given time. Not to mention the popular streamers who have 10 of thousands of subs who pay $5+ a month which Twitch gets part of. Twitch is most definitely not "dying."

What you say is true, but "thousands that are online at any given time" doesn't accurately reflect what's going on. First of all, I would think most of streams are 0-10 viewers. Then we have people that stream to multiple services simultaneously (most programming streams do this and majority of people are not watching them on twitch).

> I would think most of streams are 0-10 viewers

Most YouTube videos have 0-10 views. Most App Store apps have 0-10 downloads.

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

#97

Post by icu » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 11:55 AM UTC

selckin wrote: post #81

icu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have been a loyal user of Curse for years but when they released their app I didn't see the value and didn't want to install an attack vector on my pc. I still go to Curse, sometimes several times a week but definitely it has become a worse experience over the years. As for Discord... my guild leader switched our raid team from Teamspeak and there was some acrimony because a guild member refused to install…

What has curse done to cause this amount of distrust? (I assume you don't do this for every application you install)

I only install applications from:

a) vendors I trust b) confident in their security, and c) couldn't write the software myself.

In the case of the Curse client I just wrote my own batch scripts and used cygwin. I could have just as easily done it in Python or AutoIt.

As I wrote the software I know there is virtually no chance for malware.

I can't be as certain about the Curse client. As far as I know it isn't open source.

Maybe I'm more paranoid than most about security but it could be because I know how easily most systems are compromised.

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

#98

Post by Kihashi » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 1:27 PM UTC

andypants wrote: post #94

Ntrails wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch But I have a "global twitch emote" plugin on chrome so I presume kappa will already show up for me if used in discord?

Why would a chrome plugin affect a totally separate application?

It's not really totally separate. Discord is a web app and you can run it in chrome. The only feature that you lose is push-to-talk, last I looked.

Granted, a lot of people will run the electron-based desktop app (which packages the web site), but IIRC, there's a plugin for twitch emotes for it too.

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

#99

Post by IntelMiner » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #18

neaumusic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch has been trying to hire front end devs and they're failing at hosting anything more than a video stream. They should have acquired discord, but instead the two failing companies curse and twitch are teaming up

Can you expand upon the "failing" nature of these companies? On first sniff, I'm catching the same scent that rises from the last several decades of people proclaiming Microsoft is on the way out.

Twitch at least "won out" over competitors by just being the least terrible streaming site for the most part. Now it's gliding along purely on inertia. They haven't innovated or brought anything important to the table, they're just the biggest player at that table

Curse I'm admittedly more than slightly biased on, since I used it basically from its inception back in the World of Warcraft days, because that's all it was initially

Curse was the least awful way to manage a bucket load of WoW addons, almost like how there are package managers for Linux today. It simply provided some central place to manage and keep mods updated, especially ones that would break whenever Blizzard patched it

Curse at least, slowly evolved into this hydra-like monster, trying to split itself off into as many different things as it could. The most insidious one I remember was when I reinstalled it (for trying out the newest World of Warcraft expansion at the time) it'd evolved far beyond what I expected

Upon relaunching my system it prompted me to add literally every friend I had across Skype, Steam and League of Legends. While also overlaying its voice chat system when playing certain games (League and TF2 come to mind)

Keep in mind I never used any of these features, it was simply new garbage that Curse added to try and stay "relevant"

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

#100

Post by NTripleOne » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #95

b1naryth1ef wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Discord Dev here) Awesome to hear Discords a good fit for workplace environments too, we've heard a couple success stories around remote teams swapping. Search is a huge priority for us, but its also something we wanna spend time getting right. e.g. soon!

I haven't used Discord but if it's better than Slack you are sitting on a huge opportunity. I know your focus is gamers but the market Slack is targeting is huge. Their mobile app is garbage (at least on android). Always 'reconnecting'. Doesn't keep the recent chats offline and has to always fetch it from server. Missing/delayed notifications. Desktop app on OS X is better but it too has 'connection issues'. It looks…

I've said it before and I'll say it a thousand times more, a 'business-oriented' rebrand of discord (basically ditch all the gamery shit and allow people to host their own servers on their own hardware) would basically be pure profit.