The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘curse’

Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.

In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins that currently has over 1.6 million active users

But Curse isn’t just about World of Warcraft. The company owns blogs, wikis, community sites, and download hubs for a number of other popular games. Curse has built out about half of the communities itself, and it also actively acquires leading websites related to gaming (sometimes these sites are run by one guy in his garage, other times they’re more substantial). For example, Curse acquired DiabloFans.com, which is currently the second ranked Google match for “Diablo 3″. Diablo 3 isn’t actually out yet, but you can be sure this will be prime real estate as soon as it launches (and its community is already growing).

This forward thinking is a big part of the company’s strategy: Thieblot says that Curse tries to stay ahead of the curve, strategically trying to figure out which games are going to be hits and then positioning themselves accordingly. He’s very optimistic about MMOs on the PC, and also anticipates some major massively multiplayer hits on consoles games soon.

The Curse client is free, as is most of the site, but there’s a premium offering available for $30 a year. This includes the ability to update all of your plugins simultaneously (you have to update one by one in the free version). The premium version also allows users to save their UI setup to the server, allowing them to restore it should they start playing from a friend’s house or during a break at school. This may not sound like a big deal, but gamers can spend a very long time mapping out exactly where each of their UI elements and shortcuts appear on the screen. Thieblot says that Curse currently has over 34,000 paid subscriptions since launching the premium option eight months ago. The site shares a chunk of this revenue back to the plugin developers.

Things are looking bright for Curse. The company has “a bunch” of money in the bank, is profitable, draws 7.4 million uniques monthly, and has plans to expand internationally in the near future. Oh, and Thieblot says that he’s back on good terms with his parents.

Also see Raptr a gaming social network that offers its own downloadable client.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The allure of building a business around user-generated content is fading fast. SplashCast, a company which launched two years ago around the notion of helping consumers put together videos, text, graphics, and music in embeddable broadcast “channels,” is discontinuing its original product. “Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave,” concludes CEO Michael Berkley.

And after failing to raise a B round of funding, he is now trying to sell the company. Instead of trying to make money off of user-generated broadcast channels, he is focusing on his newer Social TV product, which adds social features such as chat, commenting, and polling to professionally-produced videos.

The SplashCast product being discontinued was simply too complicated for most consumers. It was a full content-management system which allowed consumers to bring together videos with images, text, and sound. In a candid assessment of why it fell flat, Berkley says: “We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”

While more than 100,000 SplashCast accounts have been created, “only a few thousand” use the product regularly, he tells me. Partly, this is the curse of building a business which relies on the creativity of users. “Like so many other Web 2.0 companies,” admits Berkley, “we simply haven’t found a way to meaningfully monetize user generated content. Users are loathe to pay meaningful subscription fees. Furthermore, advertising on user-generated video content hasn’t played out—just ask YouTube.” If only a tiny fraction of users create anything worthwhile, you either need a whole lot of users to make that work or you need to be able to attract the most creative people to your product.

But partly, SplashCast also suffered from the curse of not keeping things simple. Berkley is taking that to heart by shifting the company’s remaining resources to making Hulu-quality videos more social on Facebook and MySpace. Berkley says SplashCast videos reach 5.8 million unique viewers per month and it streams 7.2 million videos. A full 90 percent of those streams come from only 25 SplashCast channels, mostly centered around network TV shows like 24 and the Simpsons or major label music artists.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

French startup Goojet is coming out with an updated version of its mobile content and services suite after getting some runway with the beta product it launched about a year ago, six months after winning the Le Web 3 startup competition.

At the same time, the company is announcing that it has raised its second round of financing to the tune of €6 million (approx. $8.5 million) after raising initial funding for the project back in December 2007. The total amount of capital invested in the company is now at a healthy €8.3 million. Like its Series A round, the money comes from Partech International, Elaia Partners and IRDI-ICSO. Paris-based VC firm Orkos Capital participated in the new round as well for the first time.