Twitch Rebrands Curse Desktop App as its Own

Twitch plans to colonize the desktop with the relaunch of an app made by Curse, a gaming startup it acquired last year.

Twitch is rebranding the Curse platform as the Twitch Desktop App, and positioning it as an all-in-one communications tool for the Twitch community. The transition will roll out to existing Curse users on March 16, and new users will also be able to download the app from download.twitch.tv.

Curse's main selling points are its voice and video calls that work alongside your games. In addition to that calling capability, the rebranded Twitch app will also come with access to Whispers, Twitch's private chat messaging service.

Many of the major new features that Twitch has rolled out or announced since its acquisition of Curse last August will also be available on the app. You'll find community directories called servers, which help streamers and viewers connect based on a topic or activity. And when Twitch begins selling video games this spring, you'll be able to download and play your purchases from a library within the desktop app.

Rounding out the feature list are the abilities to access your Twitch friends list and share activities with them, as well as find automatically updating game mods and add-ons.

For now, it appears the original Curse features that made its app popular will stay following the March 16 transition. As Geek notes, the Curse app is already beloved for its ease of use and light impact on the CPU, an important consideration when you're in the midst of a resource-intensive game. The Curse app interface also runs as an overlay on top of your gaming session to minimize interruptions.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.