Curse Network

Curse Network is the owner of Siliconera and several other gaming websites.

Organization
Curse was founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2006.

As of October 2014, the Curse board of directors includes:
 * Matthieu Baret of IDInvest Partners and AGF Private Equity
 * Alain Caffi of Natixis Private Equity
 * Jean-Francois Clavier of SoftTech VC
 * Hans Tung of GGV Capital

Funding
Curse raised $16 million from various investors in July 2014. Some of this was from GGV Capital, whose director Hans Tung was given a board position at Curse.

Curse raised $5 million from AGF Private Equity in 2007. AGF partner Matthieu Baret was a Curse board member at the time.

Eusis Landale reports
Eusis Landale was fired from the moderator staff of Siliconera on the orders of someone "even higher up the foodchain than Ishaan [Sahdev]," Siliconera's editor-in-chief.

Eusis Landale's review of the ban log found that 36 of 180 users, or 20%, had been banned for commenting that they wished games would be ported to a Sony platform, most of these referencing the Playstation Vita. For one example, MaximDualBlade was banned as a "crazy Vita fanboy" for suggesting that Final Fantasy Explorers would "Get a plus version for Vita in a year or so, and overseas release" and a month of this user's posts were removed. Several other users' comments were deleted for suggesting that Playstation Portable games be ported to the Vita.

According to Eusis Landale:

Curse began following Anita mid August [2014]. Several Curse employees are following multiple anti-GG people, notable and not, and their level of interaction with them varies; Not at all beyond following, retweeting anti-GG tweets, occasional chatting. Overall nothing outright damning but still possibly suspicious.

On August 26, Eusis Landale accused moderator Puchinri of promoting Anita Sarkeesian by:

... bringing up an already highly volatile discussion, yet choosing to start it off by stating that she doesn't want to see anything but people agreeing with her, and repeating the sentiment when I point out that one statement of hers was the sort to cause more problems than it would solve... I stopped bothering at that point as it was clear she had no intention of being reasonable.

Eusis Landale made accusations against writer Chris Priestman.

Chris's articles generally read almost like advertisements and often contain links to kickstarters and such, or outright where to buy a game. All he seems to cover are indies. With his full name given, these concerns are compounded: He has a history of doing PR work and development in indie games. He also works with Kill Screen, a site linked the the GameJournoPros, as well as Steel Media. Both sites as a writer, both sites long before being with Siliconera and still at them too. This proves Ishaan's claim of no writers on the site working elsewhere to be utterly false.

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/chris-priestman/24/969/70 https://archive.today/vzmqd Good old Chris has a twitter account too. Where he follows and retweets anti-GG users. https://twitter.com/CPriestman https://archive.today/bnYp2

On October 14 or 15, Landale claimed that discussion of Gamergate has "been rather randomly getting shut down on the site." And for the record, Ishaan'll say the writers don't write anywhere else. Either he doesn't know, or he lies. And wouldn't you know it some of them have ties to GameJournoPros. They have ties to the people trying to shut GamerGate down. Siliconera is not a good place to be. The mods are generally fine, but the people running the show are guilty as fuck.

Deleted posts
Landale gave examples of deleted posts.

By Wolfe, in reference to Keiji Inafune and Mighty No. 9: I'm not all that interested in what advice he has from a business standpoint giving the behavior of his community manager as of late. I'm sure I'm not the only one with that opinion.

By Vidar Vali: I can tell you more than 20 female protagonists just from the top of my head from games I love. They aren't mainstream games, so maybe that's what you're thinking of.

But my point is, fuck off with this "muh female protagonist" bullshit, if you're not going to buy the game because of such a shallow "problem", then I don't care about you. Let the guy who made the art portray his vision of the art.

By Ghosties: I'm not a feminist, and fuck you because apparently that language is allowed here (wasn't sure if these forums were moderated).

I didn't say that EVERY female character was sexualized. Having big breasts doesn't make a character OR PERSON sexualized. I have big breasts, too, so that's not what I'm saying at all...

And it isn't SJW shit. Zoe Quinn is a fucking slut. I don't care about any of this gamergate fuckery.

I just want to enjoy a Persona game again as much as I enjoyed P3P. I'm sorry for wanting to enjoy something. Because, y'know, that's what video games are for.

By bob: Tim Schafer adamantly supports Anita Sarkeesian's efforts to be video gaming's next Jack Thompson.

Also, there's the kickstarter deal where he made several times more funding than he asked for and still couldn't complete the project. It makes me feel sorry for the publishers that had to deal with that delusional dude.

By Anonymous:

Might want to google "gamergate" and "Zoey Quinn." Just a thought.