Curse Voice

» see curse.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The voice chat I learned on was a room. An internet cafe in Turkey somewhere between 2002 and 2005, twenty machines on a local network with Counter-Strike running on all of them, and if you wanted to tell your side where the other team was, you said it out loud and everybody in the building heard you, including them. That was the protocol. It had no latency and no privacy at all.

By 2014 the room had turned into software and the software had turned into a business. Curse Voice went into open beta that May, on Windows, and it collected a million users in its first week. The number was not because voice chat was new. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak had been doing calls for a decade. It was because Curse Voice knew what you were playing.

The client hooked League of Legends and drew an overlay on top of it. There was a chat window, and there were buff timers, including countdowns for when the big neutral objectives would respawn. Curse had built a voice app that also handed you information the game deliberately did not show you.

That is where it got complicated. Riot Games had never said this was allowed and Curse could not risk finding out, so Hubert Thieblot announced the company was pulling the dragon and baron timers on its own initiative, along with the ability to drop into somebody's voice session without being asked. The client's best feature was removed by the people who built it, preemptively, to stay on good terms with a game they did not own.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the clever part ~

The self censoring turned out to be the right call commercially. In July 2015 Riot Games put thirty million dollars into Curse, which took total funding to around fifty two million by that August. The company that had been one bad conversation away from a cease and desist ended up with the game publisher as an investor.

Curse itself was older and wider than the voice product. Hubert Thieblot started it in 2006 as a place for World of Warcraft addons, and by June 2012 the network was pulling 21 million monthly unique visitors. Gamepedia launched in December 2012. The Curse Client managed mods for people who would otherwise have been dragging folders around by hand.

~ what it became ~

Twitch acquired Curse in August 2016, and the plan was never to keep it running as a separate thing. On 16 March 2017 the Curse desktop client was relaunched as the Twitch Desktop App. Twitch kept the pieces people liked, the screen sharing and the community servers, then bolted its own Friends and Whispers systems on top.

The product survived. The name did not. This was the moment Twitch decided it wanted to be Discord, roughly two years after Discord had already become Discord, and the app it used to try it with was one it had bought rather than built.

~ the second death ~

Voice came out of the Twitch Desktop App in February 2019, which killed the actual function Curse Voice had been named for. The rest of the app limped on for three more years until Twitch ended support on 30 April 2022, citing usage and community feedback, which is the standard phrasing for nobody was opening it.

The parts got sold off separately. Fandom took Curse Media, including Gamepedia and D&D Beyond, in December 2018. Overwolf bought CurseForge from Twitch on 22 June 2020, and that piece is still running, which makes the mod manager the only survivor of the whole company. The voice chat, the reason anyone downloaded it in the first place, has been gone since 2019.

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