From the SIP Trunking Experts

Home
August 18, 2015

Curse Voice Seeks to Become Go-To Gaming Communications Platform


By Christopher Mohr
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Share
Tweet

Curse announced recently that it had received $52 million in funding to be used to grow Curse Voice, its VoIP communications platform for online gamers. The company has demonstrated with previous games that participation increases when players incorporate voice communication into their gaming experience.


Based in Huntsville, Alabama, Curse, Inc. is a gaming portal that originally started in 2006 as a World of Warcraft game add-on by founder and current CEO, Hubert Thieblot. Since then, the company has expanded to become a resource for numerous games like Minecraft, Madden 15 and Magic the Gathering. It was an Inc. 500 company in 2011 and an Inc. 5000 company in 2012 and 2014.

In May 2014, Curse Voice, the company’s VoIP platform, became available in open beta and is currently available for free download. The company claims that Curse Voice beats other well-known VoIP platforms when it comes to latency, in/out bandwidth and sound quality.

Furthermore, gaming companies that used Curse Voice found that it increased participation. SMITE reported a 25.7 percent increase in the number of games played each month. When Robocraft started integrating Curse Voice into its system, the number of active players increased from 3,655 to a peak of 18,422 over three calendar days. Over 58,000 League of Legends users at any given time are using Curse Voice.

Adding communication to online games improves the gaming experience by facilitating teamwork, engagement within gaming communities, and awareness of other games through word of mouth.

Image via Shutterstock

Another key benefit of adding voice to games was that it tended to reduce the ‘toxicity’ of online game environments. At the 2013 Game Developers Conference, Jeffery Lin gave examples of toxicity, typically in the forms ranging from the mild—tasteless jokes—to more severe forms like death threats. The presence of toxicity has led to the formation of online gaming tribunals that evaluate cases of bad online behavior and impose sanctions much like court systems do. With better voice communication, such toxicity is less likely and less time would need to be spent policing players.

Curse expects to increase from 1.3 million active users to more than 10 million users by the end of this year, thanks largely to the infusion of funding it just received. This is a nearly eightfold increase, and would seem like a pie-in-the-sky claim at first glance. However, if Curse’s whitepaper on player engagement after games incorporated Curse Voice is accurate; its expectations may be dead-on. 




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
Home