Tagged <3 WeGame
Hey WeGamers!
Today I’m excited to announce some big news to the WeGame community: WeGame has been acquired by Tagged! You can read the announcement on TechCrunch here.
The team at WeGame has been working the last 4½ years to create the best experience for gamers to socialize with each other and discover new games. During this period, over 2 million gamers have joined WeGame and shared millions of videos & screenshots with friends.
I’m very excited about joining forces with Tagged. Over the last 6 years, Tagged has climbed to become a leader in the social discovery space with a strong emphasis around games. With a reach of over 100 million users, bringing WeGame under the Tagged umbrella will allow us to make an even bigger impact than we could have as a small startup. For now, WeGame will continue to operate and be as accessible and entertaining as usual!
I’d like to thank our users who have supported us through the years. Without you, there would be no WeGame! Also, a special thanks to all of our investors, advisors and friends. You know who you are!
Game on,
Jared and the WeGame team
WeGame version 2.3.8
Hi WeGamers!
I’m happy to announce that our hardworking client developers, Coedman and CaliberLore, have cranked out a new release of the WeGame client! Here’s a brief summary of the changes:
Bug Fix – 2.3.5′s updater issue: We introduced a problem in the previous version of the client that was preventing it from updating certain files on XP machines. It has been fixed.
Bug Fix - Client failure on slower computers: There was an issue effecting some slower machines that was causing the client to work incorrectly. It has been resolved.
Tweak – Settings interface update: We’ve changed the way the settings page works in order to prevent some common user errors.
Tweak – UI updates: You can now press enter and escape to proceed or cancel through many WeGame dialogs!
Tweak – Uninstaller updates: Fixed some small issues with the uninstaller
New Feature - Automatic creation of new video files: By popular demand, the WeGame client will now automatically start a new video file when it reaches the four GB limit. This means you no longer have to re-start recording in the middle of an intense boss raid in WoW, a long 3v3 in League of Legends, or an extra-challenging game of Solitaire.
That’s it for this release! If you have any issues, please post on the forums or contact us at help@wegame.com. If you have any other feature requests, please also let us know. We strive to be the very best utility for gamers, and we can only do it with your help!
-Jeff Gorndt, Operations Manager, www.wegame.com
Roxio and WeGame Partner Up to Offer Game Capture
Hi WeGamers!
I’m excited to announce our partnership with Roxio on their recently announced Roxio Game Capture and Roxio PC Game Capture products. These devices, which allow you to capture, edit and share your gameplay from both the computer and console, are powered by the WeGame technology we’ve developed over the past three years.
The Game Capture unit is a small 5″ x 3″ x 1″ device that connects to your PC via USB and your console by component video and stereo audio inputs. Your gameplay is captured as an AVI, WMV, DivX or MP4 file in 480p video, or as a JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF or GIF screenshot while your gameplay remains in HD. Once you capture your footage you can use the Roxio Game Capture’s editing tools to add voice overs, transitions and overlays to your frag videos or machinima movies. You can then share your videos directly to WeGame, Facebook or YouTube through their client.
The PC Game Capture is a software solution that captures your PC gameplay much in the same way that WeGame already does, and offers the same editing suite of the console recorder, allowing you to perfect your videos before sharing them with your friends and clanmates.
The Game Capture unit will be available on March 24th for $99.99, and the PC Game Capture Software will be available in Q2 for $49.99. They both can be purchased at Best Buy, Gamestop and Amazon, as well as the Roxio store.
I’d like to thank our users for helping us to develop such a great product, and Roxio for giving us the opportunity to bring it to a wider audience.
If you’d like to read more about these two great products, check out Kotaku, Joystiq,Gamerbits and Gamerbeat.
-Jeff Gorndt, Operations Manager, www.wegame.com
Possible Downtime 4/5/2011
Hi WeGamers,
Just wanted to make a quick post to let you know we may experience some site downtime tonight between 9 PM and 12 AM PST while we perform some server maintenance. You may experience unexpected client or website behavior during these three hours. Sorry for any inconvenience, and thank you for your continued support of WeGame!
-Jeff Gorndt, Operations Manager, www.wegame.com
WeGame Store Now Open For Business: RIFT Now Available!
Hi WeGamers!
Back in December, we announced our games digital distribution platform: Ignition. The launch of our distribution platform took us one step closer to our ultimate goal of making gaming easier and more enjoyable for everyone. We initially launched with a small catalog of games, all of which were free-to-play browser-based and client-based games from our partners like MochiMedia, Bigpoint, Subagames and others. Today, I’m happy to announce another important milestone: the launch of our first AAA game, RIFT from Trion Worlds, on WeGame. RIFT’s amazing success has surprised everyone. It’s among the top-selling titles in the US weeks after its release – a very substantial accomplishment for the first title from Trion, and a sign of even greater things to come.
To celebrate this very important milestone in our history, we’re offering RIFT at an incredible price: $35.95 for the standard edition and $42.95 for the digital collector’s edition – an amazing 28% off of the retail price. This special introductory price is only available until the end of the month, with a limited number of copies available each day, so buy now!
To get RIFT, please download the WeGame client. Then visit the RIFT game page and click the orange buy button. After purchasing RIFT, the client will start to download and install it. You can then find RIFT under your games tab, and launch it from there. After that, jump in game and enjoy! Feel free to look me up – I’m Gorndt on the Tearfall server.
In the coming weeks, expect many more quality games from top-tier publishers and developers who we are proud to call our partners. Is there a game you want to buy through WeGame? Let us know in the comments!
Please note that in this version the WeGame client will ask for UAC permissions on launch if you have UAC enabled through Windows 7 or Vista. This permission is required to record many modern games, so please click OK when the UAC window appears.
-Jeff Gorndt, Operations Manager, www.wegame.com
Wasting Your Life
Hi WeGamers!
As gamers, we’ve all been told that we’re wasting our lives when we grind away hours and hours playing videogames. While I’m not sure that it’s a waste, there’s no doubt that we spend a lot of time playing our favorite games. Today I thought we could send out a little salute to the people with the most hours played on WeGame, and let them know how else they could’ve spent their time.
Tr3ndy – #1 in League of Legends with 428 hours. Instead, you could’ve played 214 full games of tennis. That’s a game every work day for a year.
Zombieblood911 – #1 in Team Fortress 2 with 678 hours. Instead, you could’ve cooked 170 sixteen-pound turkeys. I’m not sure how long it’d take to eat them.
eldukedrino – #1 in Counter Strike: Source with 759 hours. Instead, you could’ve made 5,502 dollars, and that’s making minimum wage!
Gr4Ss – #1 in Garry’s Mod with 880 hours. Instead, you could’ve taken 4 road-trips across the United States, taking 9 days a trip!
tobix345 – #1 in Modern Warfare 2 with 902 hours. Instead, you could’ve watched 1804 TV episodes, or all of MASH, Seinfeld and Cheers, and then some.
Infarkt – #1 in World of Warcraft with 1,983 hours. Instead, you could’ve watched 991.5 movies, almost enough to cover the New York Times Top 1000 Movies.
We salute these true fans, who’ve sold out on all other hobbies in favor of their favorite games. Tune in next week for more fascinating facts from the WeGame Logs!
-Jeff Gorndt, Operations Manager, www.wegame.com
Bang for Your Buck: Making the Cost of a Videogame Make Sense
Hi WeGamers!
I thought a fun little feature today would be to examine some of the top games we track here on WeGame and look a little closer at their stats.
One big selling point of games is how many hours they take. While gamers are divided on this issue – Some saying that it doesn’t matter, and a short, cohesive experience is more important than overwhelming length, and others (myself included) want to see their 60 bucks turned into a certain number of hours of entertainment. However, it’s one thing to say that Oblivion is 100 hours of gameplay, and another to actually sit down and play it for 100 hours. I’m going to take the number of players for a game versus the number of hours played, and we’ll get an average how much time people spend on a game. Additionally, I’d like to compare this to the current price of the game, and see what’s the best buy for filling time. So here are the numbers:
Portal – 11,408 hours played by 20,136 players. Cost: $15
0.57 hours per player, 0.04 hours per dollar
Call of Duty: Black Ops – 216,764 hours played by 21,795 players. Cost: $60
9.95 hours per player, 0.17 hours per dollar
Garry’s Mod - 239,324 hours played by 18,857 players. Cost: $10
12.69 hours per player, 1.27 hours per dollar
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – 18,307 hours played by 4,470 players. Cost: $20
4.10 hours per player, 0.20 hours per dollar
Left 4 Dead - 17,520 hours played by 10,727 players. Cost: $20
1.63 hours per player, 0.08 hours per dollar
Left 4 Dead 2 – 86,076 hours played by 15,624 players. Cost: $20
5.51 hours per player, 0.28 hours per dollar
Starcraft 2 - 48,278 hours played by 10,071 players. Cost: $60
4.79 average hours per player, 0.08 hours per dollar
Team Fortress 2 – 156,369 hours played by 25,245 players. Cost: $20
6.19 average hours per player, 0.31 hours per dollar
World of Warcraft – 1,667,692 hours played by 88,116 players. Cost: As much as you want to spend.
18.93 average hours per player. ??? hours per dollar
Of course there’s more to consider here than just the numbers. People are more likely to run the WeGame client in conjunction with Garry’s Mod than they are with Left 4 Dead, but as long as they have the game installed they’re counted as a player. Furthermore, some of these games were hard-to-avoid impulse buys – Portal, for example, was free for a few weeks earlier in the year, which I’m sure resulted in a large number of people getting the game that weren’t necessarily interested in playing it.
Even with that in mind, though, I’m pretty surprised by the results. I’m the type that if I buy a game, I’m gonna play it until I hate it, which usually means at least 2 runs through single player and as much multiplayer as I can bear. For example, while the average WeGamer has played 6.19 hours of Team Fortress 2, I’m at 153. Even the age of the game and not running the WeGame client doesn’t account for that level of difference. It seems to show that the average player is very casual, and that a very visible minority (Including me!) gives gamers the reputation for being obsessive nerds.
-Jeff Gorndt, Relationship Manager, www.wegame.com
