Twitch is headed to your desktop.
Amazon’s community broadcasting website is rebranding the Curse app as the Twitch desktop program. In August, Twitch acquired Curse, which is a social platform for gamers. Now, Twitch is shifting Curse to look and feel like an extension of the popular video site that has millions of streamers and hundreds of millions of viewers each month. The desktop app enables you to build communities with friends lists, chat, and voice rooms, and it competes with Discord — the dominant social platform in the gaming space. The Twitch desktop app will launch officially March 16, and you can get it from the company’s download site.
Now under the Twitch banner, this app will now compete with more than Discord. Amazon recently revealed that it is bringing game purchases to livestreams, and the desktop program will serve as a library for any games that you download from the service. Amazon is attempting to build a platform where people buy, launch, discuss, and broadcast games all through Twitch, and that could help it expand its presence in this space significantly.
“Since the Twitch community thrives on building solid and meaningful connections with each other, we have been hard at work building products that address this need,” Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear said in a statement. “The Twitch Desktop App, which features all of the elements people love about the Curse app, such as screen sharing, voice and video calling, and community server creation, is now bolstered by Twitch features. This includes Friends, Whispers, activity sharing, and will soon serve as a game library for purchases fulfilled by Twitch. The result is a one-stop shop for connecting members of our community.”
Twitch is not the only company trying to get a desktop app running on gamers’ computers. In addition to the aforementioned Discord and Steam, companies like GOG, Ubisoft, and EA all have their own apps as well. But Twitch may have an advantage getting people to install its app because its community is so faithful.