This week, popular game livestreaming platform Twitch, and by extension its owner, Amazon, announced that it had paid an undisclosed amount to acquire Curse Inc, the operator of a number online gaming networks and the creator of two major third-party gaming tools. This is big news for Twitch, but it also marks an important shift for Amazon, making the company’s direct involvement in the video game industry even stronger.

The acquisition puts Amazon in charge of several well known gaming networks, including gamer wiki site Gamepedia.com and Hearthstone community Hearthpwn.com, but two of the biggest products gained by Amazon are software tools created by Curse.

The first and most popular of these is the Curse Client, a multimedia gaming platform that allows users to install, play, and manage a number of popular games, including Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and others. One of the most popular features of the Curse Client is the ability to manage third-party game addons and mods. This feature helped popularize the client with members of the World of Warcraft community, many of whom use the app to install dozens of addons for the game and keep them up to date. Without Curse, this process must be done manually, with players having to extract addon files into the proper folder and then keep track of when new updates are released.

Curse’s other major software product is Curse Voice, a VOIP client that can be used for voice communication in a number of online games. Curse Voice includes an overlay that can be displayed in-game, showing useful information such as which players are in the channel and who is currently speaking. Since creating Curse Voice, Curse has been specifically targetting the League of Legends community, and the company even received a hefty $30 million investment from League creator Riot Games, which is owned by Chinese megacorp Tencent Holdings Ltd.

It is unclear at the moment what the Curse acquisition will mean for its products and communities, but Twitch noted in a blog post that the acquisition “will help provide gamers with the tools and resources they need to achieve the ultimate gaming experience.” It is likely that we will see some kind of integration between Curse’s software and Twitch, but at the moment, neither company has commented on how exactly they will be tied together.

Image courtesy of Twitch Interactive Inc