The game industry and its audience has grown so large that there’s not only room for game publishers, but companies that provide products and services aimed at gamers. One of the largest and most diversified companies serving the game industry in this fashion is Curse, which combines gaming communities, game wikis, utilities like Curse Voice (where Riot Games recently invested $30 million), and the Union for Gamer MCN on YouTube that pulls in 1.2 billion views a month. The company is building great relationships with both publishers and gamers, and its efforts are something game marketers should be watching closely.
Nathan Lindberg, vice president of sales for Curse, spoke with [a]listdaily about the company’s success across a wide variety of services for gamers and where the company is headed next.
Curse Voice has really come a long way, and now with Riot Games investing it seems poised for even more. What’s ahead for Curse Voice?
To say we’re excited about Curse Voice’s success is an understatement. It started out as a true passion side project and is growing into a must-use for gamers everywhere. For us, the next 12-24 months we are going to be focused on three key areas for Voice:
- Expansion into more games — We’ve seen massive success with titles like League of Legends, SMITE, and Evolve, but there are many more titles that are already out like World of Tanks, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Path of Exile and others we feel Curse Voice would be excellent for.
- Optimizations and Additional Features for existing games — We’ve done a good job supporting the games we already have connected with Curse Voice, but there’s more to be done.
- General features and heavy polish — We’re still in beta! So there is much to work on still from a polish perspective. We have a high standard and relish having such an open dialogue with our community.
Curse’s communities have been a great benefit to a number of games. How have these communities been evolving over the last year, and what’s ahead for them?
Gaming communities are such an important part of successful game franchises these days that we see this area continuing to increase and do a better job of integrating with publishers. For a long time, these communities were outcasts, rogue websites just providing information to people fed up with the News & Reviews establishment. As we move forward, the unifying theme we’ll see is a more honest and open partnership with publishers. Over the last eight years, more and more publishers are realizing that Curse presents a symbiotic relationship for them, where as if they do well, our websites and wikis prosper as well.
From there, we’ll have to work with each partner to best determine their needs, could be a mobile app like we launched for FUTHead.com or it might be expanded integrations with Curse Voice (like we’ve done with Hi-Rez’s SMITE). It’s all a matter of what’s best for the players, once we find that agreement with a publisher, great things will happen next.
Curse has multiple parts to its business, from communities to Curse Voice to strategy guides to eSports. Such a diverse assemblage of products and services is a marketing challenge — what are your most effective marketing tactics?
It’s true, we’ve got quite a few pots we’re stirring in the gaming space, but everything boils down to one key focus: Providing the best resources and tools to help gamers “Enjoy the Game.” It’s a phrase we take seriously and something we, as a company, constantly evaluate. Gaming has been one of the fastest evolving businesses within the last 10 years and we’re seeing new demands from gamers. Our goal is to help meet those demands and help our media partners achieve the same thing. If we keep our focus on that, the right opportunities and tactics will present themselves naturally. Today we have four pillars to Community: Create, Contribute, Content and Communicate. These four pillars represent our four focuses as a company:
- Create — Our Union for Gamer MCN on YouTube, home to over 5,000 creators, 100 million subscribers and 1.2 billion views a month. It’s ranked in the top 35 of ComScore’s Video Top 100 platforms report and one of the hottest growing segments of the gaming space.
- Contribute — Refers to Gamepedia, our purely gaming wiki platform that is both content and publisher friendly. We have over 800 wikis currently, with nearly 300 of them as the official wiki for the game they cover (including massive titles like Titanfall, Everquest Next and most recently Mad Max).
- Content — This is the spot for our website communities, which is comprised of 65+ video game related sites, gaming resources, and apps that cover the biggest franchises in the industry from World of Warcraft to League of Legends, FIFA to Madden and Minecraft to Terraria, our websites are the lifeblood of the community of gamers that makes these franchises so special.
- Communicate — Our Curse Voice platform is the clearest and fastest way for gamers to communicate. The platform utilizes cloud server technology to maintain privacy while allowing gamers to connect, play and disconnect seamlessly and safely.
What got you most excited at this year’s E3 show for Curse and the year ahead?
For starters, I just love E3, it is such a wonderful time and place to be a gamer. There were a number of announcements that got Curse really excited:
- Fallout 4 — First and foremost, WHOA, does that look awesome or what Curse is extremely excited for the opportunity to partner with the folks at Bethesda on the game. The franchise has a mod community that has really taken shape since Fallout 3 and we hope to reignite those creative passions for Fallout 4.
- Draft Champions in Madden ’16 — This is an awesome new mode that they’ve added to the game, based off the phenomenon that is Fantasy Football drafting. This new mode allows players to try out new cards before they buy and will hopefully increase players’ enjoyment of the Ultimate Team mode. For us, this led MUTHead.com to launch a “Pack Generator” section on our website, dedicated to showing fans what they might expect in packs. It was a community led feature that resulted in our largest traffic day ever, in the middle of the offseason.
- Continued growth of the Battle Arena genre — With folks like 2K and Bethesda getting into the game of short, action based multiplayer combat with titles like Battleborn and Battlecry, we see tremendous opportunity for continued growth with Curse Voice integrations and partnerships. So far, games like League of Legends, Robocraft and SMITE have been catalysts for our Voice technology and we are really excited to grow those partnerships out with exceptional looking games like those two and more.
What are the big goals for Curse in the coming year?
2015 has already been an amazing year for Curse as a company. We’ve made numerous major announcements, however our CEO Hubert Thieblot, always keeps us grounded and humbled, reminding us that “the work is just beginning.” In order to maintain the goals we’ve given ourselves for 2015 and 2016 we’ll need to execute flawlessly on three main priorities:
- Making Curse Voice the best solution for gamers, period. This calling is not only a business one, but a companywide passion. Curse Voice has the potential to be the default communications platform for gamers everywhere and we owe it to ourselves and to our users to make sure that it outperforms, out-features and outdoes the competition. For us, this is a must, there is no try!
- Expanding our official partnerships for Gamepedia is another prime focus. As the most layout friendly wiki platform for gamers, publishers are realizing more and more the value of partnering with it. Curse needs to focus on expanding our dashboard reporting abilities for publishers, especially partners with multiple franchises within our Gamepedia platform. As well, we need to continue innovating on the ways we incentivize our millions of contributors, they are the core of what makes Gamepedia great and we want to make sure they continue for years to come.
- Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is continuing to grow and revolutionize our Union for Gamers MCN on YouTube. This is a program with limitless possibilities and our abilities to connect brands to their evangelists is essential for increasing the overall ecosystem of the gaming industry. So many partners come to us, asking how they can leverage and partner with content creators, but they have a myriad of issues in trying to get those programs off the ground. One of the items Curse will be discussing at the [a]list Video Summit in August will be about our influencer ad program and the massive success brands like Nestle, Dell and Activision have found with it. Continuing to be that innovator in this space is going to clearly define us away from being just another participant in the space.