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Less than a couple of years after being acquired by Amazon, Twitch has flexed its muscles in the online gaming community genre by acquiring Curse for an undisclosed amount. While Twitch remains the world’s largest video game streaming service, it will be interesting to see how it will use Curse’s reach and abilities to become more user-friendly and bring in more features in the coming days. While Twitch lets you view how games are played before you either buy those games or if you simply like watching, Curse runs a number of community websites for popular online games and lets users chat among themselves, learn more about game hacks and even interact with each other using VoIP, like in the case of a product named Curse built specifically for PC users.
If Twitch decides to integrate Curse with its own platform, the resulting product could be a great one for gaming fans to stream game videos and interact with other visitors at the same time. It may also result in an in-house broadcasting solution which is currently not being offered by Twitch. Google was eyeing Twitch at one point before Amazon scooped them up, which resulted in Google giving birth to YouTube Gaming to take on the might of Twitch in the game-streaming genre. The acquisition of Curse could be another way for Twitch to maintain its lead in the market apart from offering more services to its loyal fan base. Curse presently boasts over 30 million monthly visits in its communities and websites and if Twitch can bring them over to add to its own base of around a 100 million users, it will be great for the company’s future, although it’s worth mentioning that there is likely plenty of overlap from users who actively engage with both Curse and Twitch. At the moment, both Twitch and Curse run streaming and community sites for a number of popular games like Counter Strike, League of Legends, and Hearthstone so the fact that both services may expand to a lot more games seems quite plausible.
Back in March, YouTube Gaming expanded to new countries like Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to allow not only a large number of its users stream game videos, but also to let streamers monetize their efforts easily using AdSense. As such, despite Twitch’s popularity, YouTube Gaming could be closing the gap of late and given how both services have come up with competitive offerings, it is difficult to decide who’ll be a clear winner ten years down the line. However, Twitch’s recent acquisition of Curse will surely go a long way in deciding the fate of both streaming services in the long run.