Finding a product that’s right for the market isn’t always easy, but when you’re the end user experiencing a real pain point, the solution may be more obvious. That is the case of the recently financed share creatorsa platform that helps game developers manage and store large media assets as remote work becomes more and more common in the industry.
Based in the Bay Area, the startup recently closed a new round of funding, a $3 million tranche from China’s 5Y Capital and $2 million from PDF reader Foxit.
Before going into art asset management, Ada Liu ran a game design consulting company that generated several million dollars in revenue per year; that business is now running alongside her new venture.
“Dropbox started in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released, marking the beginning of the transition from PC to mobile. A decade later, the fundamental form of data storage hasn’t really evolved,” Liu says when asked why he decided to launch another startup despite good income from the consultancy. “Asset management technology will have to move forward.”
Having worked as a game artist for the San Francisco outpost of NetEase, China’s second largest gaming company, Liu is uniquely positioned to understand the gaming business in China and the US.
In fact, he saw an opportunity as China tightened control over the domestic gaming industry, prompting Tencent, NetEase and up-and-coming developers like MiHoYo to seek further growth abroad. Several of them began outsourcing production to Liu’s firm, whether designing in-game characters or doing promotional material for foreign markets, any job that couldn’t be done efficiently in-house as video games became more sophisticated by the day. day.
As her design business took off, Liu saw another demand from her Chinese clients.
“When companies sent us raw materials, it took a long time for the files to download, but we often only had four weeks to work on a project,” he says. “We searched the market for productivity tools, but they were too expensive or outdated, so we built our own in-house tool…and soon others started asking us if we could sell them the software.”
Anyone who has run a media business knows the pain of searching for an old asset, probably lost on the ever-growing server as employees come and go. If you end up working on the wrong asset, you waste money and miss deadlines.
“A game can have like 200 characters, each of which can take about 30 days of work, so messing up even one [character] you’re wasting a lot of time,” says Liu.
There are a handful of digital asset management tools out there, but few are designed to handle large 3D assets. Share Creators is designed to transfer multi-hundred-gigabyte files that can be viewed in the cloud without the need for native software, a feature that existing file-sharing services lack, Liu says. The preview option, which can process more than 100 file types, is possible when compressing assets and converting media formats to make them compatible with the platform.
Developers also won’t have to worry about enforcing a consistent file naming system. That’s done by Share Creators, which uses AI to recognize and tag images so users can search for assets with keywords like “grass.” Like many other creative tools that are compared to Figma, the platform makes remote collaboration one of its key features. It’s also tapping into another hot tech trend, machine-generated content, as it weighs the option of letting users produce simple assets like trees directly from AI engines.
Share Creators, which launched a year ago, has received 200 sales listings in the past month alone, according to Liu. The “Top 20” game companies in China have now used the platform to manage media assets. Three key accounts are paying over $200,000 a year for privately implemented, custom services: Large companies may be shy about uploading their prized art assets to a third party, which is why the platform supports private hosting. Another ten customers are paying for their regular subscription service, the founder says.
