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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

#71

Post by ycombinatorMan »

tantalor wrote: post #56
iherbig wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't pay to watch, they pay to support the streamer. Most streamers have subscriber/donation/cheer notifications appear on-screen in some way. Making partner on Twitch (which enables subscriptions) requires the streamer to have a consistent number of viewers each time they stream, and they must stream fairly often. It's not uncommon to see streamers with a fairly sizeable number of subscribers any given month.

Alright, I understand that. You suggest it's an ethical decision rather than economic; that streamers deserve the support. But why? I fund a few YouTubers on patreon, because they create content in the traditional sense, e.g., research, writing, filming, editing, etc. That's hard work. Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day. Why do they need support? Sure, wa…

uh, because you value their content?

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

#72

Post by Cogito »

detaro wrote: post #50
ben_jones wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curse has tendrils in dozens if not hundreds of niche gaming sites, all with ravenously loyal fans with really high usage rates. When I was a kid I wanted to improve one of their data visualizations so I sent an admin an email about it and they never got back to me :-(. Edit: I really hope their isn't a consolidation of gaming communities like Twitch is trying to do because it's only going to pander to the lowest com…

With Microsoft buying Beam and Google maybe doing more with YouTube streaming, I'd say at least the streaming part of the market doesn't look like it will consolidate further, but rather split up more, away from only Twitch.

I hope that the market is able to support all of them, and we see robust competition.

From what I can tell, streamers have no issue streaming on both twitch and youtube, and it mostly comes down to content restrictions as to which they use as their primary (twitch is fairly strict about streamers doing something 'creative', I think to avoid cam girl like activity).

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

#73

Post by scrollaway »

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!

Remote startup checking in here - we're in the gaming industry and Discord has been a perfect fit for us. We love it.

Our top "wanted" features right now are video chat/screenshare, so that we can drop Hangouts entirely, and search. We wish we could pay you guys. Seriously.

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

#74

Post by xiaoma »

smnplk wrote: post #40
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will stand corrected, with this excellent example.

God, I'm so disconnected with current millennial trends, I had to lookup what those stickers were.

It's probably due to location. LINE is absolutely dominant in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and a few other Asian markets. None of my friends in America use it really. Facebook messenger is clearly watching LINE closely though.

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

#75

Post by Nullabillity »

antidamage wrote: post #61
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.

Because as far as I know it has the only useful mod management tool. It's nice, works and doesn't cause problems. Every time I come back to WoW, there's the Curse client, ready to help me get my mods and settings all sorted again. It has never failed me. Are you able to say why you think Curse is terrible?

> It's nice, works and doesn't cause problems.

That's a bit of an overstatement. It's very slow and, like any ClickOnce application, is a pain to get working under Wine.

Searching around there were apparently better tools, but Curse shut down their access. Imagine if GitHub were to stuff their desktop client full of ads and then require you to use that instead of the Git CLI.

And if they do merge it with Curse Voice (as they claim to plan to) then I expect it will stop working entirely...

For syncing/backups you can just symlink Interface/Addons and WTF to somewhere in Dropbox/Owncloud, no need for a specific application (and subscription) for that.

Full disclosure: A few years ago I published an add-on on Curse and apparently I still have free premium ~80% of the year after that. I still use their client because they're the only game in town these days, sadly.

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

#76

Post by pdkl95 »

tantalor wrote: post #56
iherbig wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't pay to watch, they pay to support the streamer. Most streamers have subscriber/donation/cheer notifications appear on-screen in some way. Making partner on Twitch (which enables subscriptions) requires the streamer to have a consistent number of viewers each time they stream, and they must stream fairly often. It's not uncommon to see streamers with a fairly sizeable number of subscribers any given month.

Alright, I understand that. You suggest it's an ethical decision rather than economic; that streamers deserve the support. But why? I fund a few YouTubers on patreon, because they create content in the traditional sense, e.g., research, writing, filming, editing, etc. That's hard work. Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day. Why do they need support? Sure, wa…

> Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day.

You seem to be missing what they do: they are entertainers. They aren't "playing video games" all day; that's just the medium. People come to see the entertainer. The most successful streamers create a unique character that people want to see, often regardless of the specific game being played.

Some people also integrate legitimate review and and critique into some of their shows (not to be confused with the current plague of "reviews" that are actually paid native advertising).

> Sure, watching a stream is entertaining

See, you do understand. Being an entertainer is work. Just like the standup comic, the better streamers/youtubers know they are putting on a show. It may be unscripted, but that may make the job harder requiring a quicker wit.

> The only thing I can think of is more support might allow a streamer to devote more of their time to streaming.

That's the point. If you like someone's work and want more, paying them so they can spend more time creating is a good idea.

(as others have said, some are also a kind of club/community manager where they also maintain other things such as a community game server or website/forum)

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

#77

Post by Nullabillity »

xenihn wrote: post #26
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.

Where is the option to host the Discord server yourself? Where is the Linux client? Is there an overlay that works on more than a tiny handful of games and doesn't click-jack? If it's so great where it does at least work, how come they have to bribe streamers to use it?

Discord brings a new coat of paint, but nothing of any substance.

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

#78

Post by emp_zealoth »

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".

You do realise it is completely backwards, right? The crates were first to arrive, only after that the real money market came along. Sure, the boxes themselves were a little scammy, but it was not like it meant anything gameplay wise, unlike most of in-game purchases ever - where you have to continually feed money to be able to keep up

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

#79

Post by imtringued »

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".

You can generally buy the majority of items you want directly and it's often actually cheaper than buying 200 crates to get some item with a 0.5% chance.

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

#80

Post by icu »

Blackthorn wrote: post #30
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.

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 Discord as he felt strongly that it was a security threat and malware.

I did try to substantiate these claims but couldn't find proof one way or the other.

As a precaution I've resized my hard drive and installed a separate Windows for gaming and encrypted each partion separately to isolate Discord from my personal files.

Several weeks into using Discord I think it is better than Teamspeak for overall features but in a raid situation with 20 on simultaneously the quality isn't as good as paying for a private Teamspeak server. Having said that though Discord is free and allows for a much richer experience so if they can sort out voice reliability and quality it will be a compelling proposition.

I still have concerns as to the security of Discord as their website pretty much brushes over the topic but they do offer two factor for what it's worth... but I can't raid with my guild without it so I'm stuck using it.

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