One of the things we had at the time was a private add-on database - at this point it was just an FTP with a bunch of add-ons we were using for raids during the beta of the game. We wanted to start a community and we needed to find a niche that would bring people in. We had a guild website, and we decided that we wanted to build additional features to that site in order to attract more people - features for the game, but not ones that were necessarily related to our guild. I then played Dark Age of Camelot, and a bunch of other games, before World of Warcraft came along and I got into a decent guild of pretty good players. Well, I started myself playing MMOs when I was 15 with a game called The Fourth Coming - which was small GOA MMO, and the first one localised in French - about ten years ago. Here the CEO of Curse Inc, Hubert Thieblot, talks about the company's journey, how a passion can become a profitable business, and why he's looking forward to the rise of console MMOs.Ĭurse is something that grew out of a passion for games - talk a bit about where the whole thing rose up from.
Since 2007 the company has raised USD 11 million in two rounds of funding, and branched out into other games and other sites. One site to spot the trend early on and offer a platform for gamers to centralise their add-on requirements was Curse - originally a guild website which developed into a fan destination, before the company began to capitalise on its audience and expand its operations. Such modifications sprang up for all kinds of in-game activity, from combat to exploration, and such has been the popularity of some add-ons that Blizzard has incorporated solutions of its own into the default user interface. With the rise of World of Warcraft came an increase in the popularity of tools which enabled gamers to customise their own experiences - generally known as add-ons.