The Blessing of Curse

Well, Curse.com is mostly UI add-ons for now. We've done a lot of development around it, and on the author side we've built something like a SourceForge for UI add-ons. Right now we have about 5000 projects on the site, representing more than 10,000 active authors collaborating together to build them.

On the user side we've got the Curse client, which is used by 1.6 million active users, to manage all their add-ons - and of that number each person uses an average of 21 add-ons... which is pretty big.

And as you mentioned, we've got some activity on other titles as well, such as Warhammer, Runes of Magic and Conan, and we'll support any new MMOs having add-on support on the site as well.

We've also added support for add-on tags, where people can upload screenshots and tag the add-ons they use - a bit like tagging people on Facebook. That's been really good for traffic, and it's really helped the less expert gamers to find useful add-ons.

But right now Curse is about 50 per cent of our traffic - we've expanded into acquiring niche news and forum websites dedicated to single games. So we have Diablofans.com, WorldofRaids.com and AionSource.com, as well as various databases on games. Basically, for every new game we look at, how can we add value for the gamers?

Most of the time, as we play the games ourselves, we can look at what would be beneficial, and what's needed to have a better experience.

It's great - we have three websites right now, and they give us interviews. We respect their terms of use and the guidelines they have for fansites.

I think there are multiple benefits to add-ons. The first, and biggest, is that the user interface is the first thing that people look at when they enter a game. That's how you control your game and character - so allowing add-ons and customising the skin of the interface allows for a level of freshness. It's a game within a game, and it keeps a lot of people motivated - if they want something new, they don't need to wait for the publisher, they can just go on our site and download extra add-ons.

So I think it benefits the publisher because people spend more time in the game. But I think also think it helps the publisher to understand what the community wants in a user interface. Blizzard has, in nearly every patch, added features that add-ons had been doing before - I think it's expected.

Look at the iPhone business - even Apple is doing it, so they'll add a default application to the handset's line-up that was popular as an App previously, such as voice recording.

I think authors... some don't care, while others aren't very happy with it. I'd say more than half the time people still use the add-ons they were using before anyway, because sometimes new features can be buried in the default UI and a user won't know how to find it - while the add-on will continue to work as before. I think a lot of people use add-ons to do a lot of stuff the default UI can already do...

But I think the default UI in World of Warcraft has quietly improved in the past four years, and I think that benefits everyone - it makes a better game.

We share 20 per cent of all our subscription revenues to authors. We've had the premium subscription live for eight months and we've already made multiple tens of thousands of dollars of payments.

The UI community has been really appreciative of what we've done, and every day we're looking at ways to do more - because they create 50 per cent of the content sales, so they're an important community to work with.