WeGame

The story of WeGame is a tale of two distinct ventures. The first began in 2007, founded by a 19-year-old UC Berkeley dropout, Jared Kim. His vision was to create a "YouTube for Gaming," a platform allowing players to easily record and share gameplay clips. With initial funding of $500,000 in a round led by Naval Ravikant, and a subsequent $3 million Series A, WeGame developed a tool for gamers to capture their play and build a social graph around their interests. In 2011, this version of WeGame was acquired by the social network Tagged. The second, more prominent WeGame, emerged from the Chinese tech giant, Tencent. In April 2017, Tencent announced it was rebranding its massive Tencent Games Platform (TGP) into WeGame. With an existing user base of over 200 million, the platform was positioned as a direct competitor to Steam, focusing on distributing PC and standalone games in China and, eventually, to a global audience. Tencent's WeGame launched officially on September 1, 2017, aiming to create an open ecosystem with services like live streaming, game downloads, and community features, leveraging Tencent's vast portfolio of gaming investments.