The concept for 19-year old Jared Kim’s crowdsourced game video website WeGame sounds promising even on paper, but some have decided it’s worth considerable investment. TechCrunch reports that the young entrepreneur has secured three million dollars in a second round of investment, on top of $500,000 previously raised in the first six months of operation.
TechCrunch initally described the website in January:
As Kim puts it, the launch of WeGame is like launching YouTube and giving everyone video cameras, because WeGame not only provides a place to upload and share videos, it provides the tools necessary to create the video content itself.
Capturing screencasts of gameplay is currently difficult because recording programs hog system resources, thereby slowing down the games themselves. They also don’t tend to output video files that are compressed well enough for upload. And if you’ve ever tried to convert and resize video clips, you know how much of a pain that is.
WeGame steps in by providing a free desktop client that works tightly with DirectX to capture screencasts from within games without slowing them down significantly. It also outputs those screencasts to AVI files that are small enough for quick uploading to the web, a process that occurs from within the client itself. To record a screencast, just hit a special key while in-game to start and then stop recording. Once you’ve exited the game, you can click the “Upload to WeGame� button, choose a title and description, and the client will convert the AVI file to Flash and publish to the WeGame site directly.
Currently in public beta, the site boasts twice the bandwidth (600kbps) of YouTube, and currently holds 7,000 videos with more no doubt on the way. Check it out at WeGame.com.
July 4th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Geez I guess pays to have solid connections to get funding these days as a 19 year old kid. Maybe I should tell my sister to marry a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur with a ton of good VC friends. Also, the site doesn’t seem to get legit organic traffic since they are on Digg almost every other submission here: http://digg.com/videos/gaming with the same influential users (haxr, gikko, etc) submitting their videos. It’s obvious that the money raised goes to paying influential Digg user to promote their content. They probably game StumbleUpon, Reddit, and other social bookmarking websites as well. This is a not a real business people!
-JT