Twitch Sale Of Curse Media Will Combine Two Popular Gaming Wikis

Wiki site Fandom announced yesterday that they will acquire Curse Media, which runs gaming wiki site Gamepedia, from Twitch. Twitch owned Curse Media for just two years.

“We’ve signed a definitive agreement to acquire Curse Media from Twitch, Inc; including all media assets and employees,” a Fandom rep said in an e-mail to Kotaku. Fandom plans on “combining” Gamepedia into their operation.

Curse Media is a network of gaming sites that have included Hearthpwn, MMO-Champion and forums for Minecraft. Gamepedia is one of the jewels in its cap and, according to SimilarWeb, earns an average of 133 million monthly visits. While at face it seems intuitive to consolidate these two behemoth gaming wikis, the reality of the deal may be more complicated. Fandom has over 300,000 wiki communities, many of which overlap with Gamepedia’s 2,200 wikis. In September, Kotaku reported that some community members running Fandom’s wikis were considering jumping ship to Gamepedia in part because of Fandom’s intrusive autoplaying ads. Now, they may be in a bind. When Kotaku asked Fandom how the site will look in the coming months, Fandom did not offer any specific details.

Gamepedia also has autoplaying video units, but in the form of Twitch livestreams embedded at the bottom of its wiki pages. In October, Kotaku reported that Gamepedia may have been inflating some channels’ Twitch views by embedding livestreams on their much-trafficked wiki pages. A couple of livestreams saw their viewer count inflated by 700-800% because of these Gamepedia embeds. One streamer, SirSlaw, said his views were one inflated by 2,156% because of Gamepedia. These views appeared superficial—while they aren’t botted, and are initiated by humans, these humans may not have been actually viewing the livestreams as they browsed the Gamepedia pages they were embedded in.

In a statement to Kotaku, Twitch wrote, “We’ve signed an agreement for Fandom to acquire Curse Media and make it part of their offering to gamer communities. . . Twitch will continue to focus on our priorities supporting streamers’ ability to earn a living educating and entertaining fans.”

Fandom says they expect the deal to close early 2019.

[Correction—11:40 am ET]: An earlier version of this story stated that Fandom is acquiring Curse LLC from Twitch. Fandom is acquiring Curse Media from Twitch—that’s Curse’s network of websites. We regret the error.