Our sister site Gamasutra has an interview with CEO Hubert Thieblot and general manager Wilson Kriegel of MMO-focused gaming portal Curse. Since its founding in 2005, it's developed from an add-on database into its current fourth iteration - a fully fledged community touch-point, complete with social networking aspects, game-specific Wikis, and user submitted videos.

The venture attracted investor interest toward the end of last year, with $800,000 raised in an angel funding round in December. More recently, at the end of July, Curse announced that it has received $5 million in Series A funding from French venture capital firm Private Equity and investors. From the interview:

GS: What do you think are the most important elements in making the business a long term, global prospect?

HT: We have a few focuses. First is working much closer with game developers and publishers. We want to position ourselves into a service company, where we provide a service for them and the community. We build websites for them, we apply our knowledge about building a successful website with multiple services, which they do need for the game nowadays.

We are also building a huge sales force, so, again, making money is a huge part of Curse, and it’s what we do everyday. We’re also building a premium site, to combat against Gamespot, FilePlanet, IGN, and so on. It’s going to be a monthly subscription, and I think we have some pretty neat ideas about how to sue the social network and the add-ons and downloads, and all of this will tie together. We’re adding an application into this.

WK: I think the root and the essence of what Curse is, more than being a social network site, is the development of web technologies and innovations. I like to consider us a web technology site, in that regard – a lot more like Photobucket and Digg and YouTube, where technology is the essence of user generated content or what’s most pertinent or relevant to that particular individual or particular IP. We intend to stay in the MMO space, and there are many contents to cover in that space. It’s very mature in Asia, which will enter the US market, and we intend to facilitate that.

The premium subscription, ecommerce – it’s all in line with what our community and user base is accustomed to, and is willing to transact on. I think, at the heart of that, is innovation of product and services, and value added services, both to the user base, and potential partners, like publishers. I think Apple is a good example of a company that is successful because of innovation around products. I hope that we – not to compare ourselves to Apple – but I hope we can stay within that philosophy of innovating for the consumer for a great product and great value adds.

I think that’s the key to why we’ve been successful, and why we’ll continue to be a viable, profitable, innovative company.