Curse – a Maker of Social Networks for Multi-Player Games

Curse, another online company that offers social networking around multi-player online games, has received a $5 million in the first round of venture capital funding.

Curse offers gamers the standard social networking features around their games, from the image and video uploading to blogging, social bookmarking, wikis, databases, forums, and guild website hosting.

The funding, which comes from France’s AGF Private Equity and other individual investors, follows more than $800,000 in angel money, the company said in a statement. It also comes as venture capitalists are pumping money into other companies doing similar things, from Multiverse, which provides a way for developers to produce their own games, to Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning’s Rupture, a more direct competitor that also builds social networking around existing games.

Gaming remains hot. Silicon Valley angel investor Jeff Clavier recently told us he’d resumed investing in Internet companies again after a brief hiatus at the end of last year, in part because of the promise of online gaming.