Share Creators hopes to fix the mess in asset management for game developers

Find a product-market fit It’s not always easy but if you are the end user experiencing real pain, it might be easier. This is the case with newly-funded initiatives. Share CreatorsGame developers can use, which is a platform to store and manage large media assets. Remote work has become increasingly common in the industry.

The startup is based in the Bay Area and recently closed a round of funding. It received a $3 million tranche form China’s 5Y Capital, as well as $2 million from Foxit PDF reader.

Ada Liu, before she entered art asset management was running a game consulting company that earned several million dollars per year. This business is now part of her new venture.

“Dropbox began in 2007, which was the year the iPhone first launched. This marked the start of the transition from PCs to mobile. Liu, when she was asked why she decided not to start another startup despite a substantial income from her consulting company a decade ago, said that “the fundamental way of data storage hasn’t really evolved” “Asset management technology must advance.”

Liu has worked as a game artist at the San Francisco office of NetEase in China, China’s second largest gaming company. This unique position allows Liu to understand the U.S. gaming industry.

In China, she saw an opportunity. tightened control over the domestic gaming sectorTencent, NetEase and other rising developers such as MiHoYo were all driven by this. to seek more growth abroad. Many of them started outsourcing production to Liu’s company, whether it was designing characters in-game or creating promotional materials for overseas markets. This is because video games are becoming more complex by the day.

Liu noticed another demand from Chinese clients as her design business grew.

“When companies sent us raw material, it took a while for the files to download. But we often had only four weeks to work on projects,” she said. “We searched for productivity tools on market, but they were either too pricey or outdated. We made our own, and other people started asking if the software could be sold to them.”

Anybody who has managed a media company knows how frustrating it is to look for an asset that’s lost in the ever-changing server. You can waste money and miss deadlines if you end up working on the wrong asset.

“A game can contain 200 characters. Each one can take 30 days to create, so if you mess up even one, it can be a huge problem.” [character] Liu says, “Is losing a large chunk of my time.”

While there are some digital asset management software options, very few are capable of dealing with large-sized 3D assets. Liu claims that Share Creators can transfer files up to several hundred gigabytes and view them on the cloud. This is a feature that many file-sharing platforms lack. Preview allows you to preview files of over 100 types. This is done by compressing and converting media formats so that they are compatible with the platform.

Developers won’t need to worry about creating a consistent file name system. Share Creators uses AI to recognize images and tags them so that users can search for assets using keywords such as “grass”. Like many other creative tools, remote collaboration is a key feature of the platform. The platform is also tapping into another tech trend, machine-generated content. It weighs the possibility of allowing users to create simple assets such as trees from AI engines.

Liu reports that Share Creators went live one year ago and has received 200 sales quotations in the past month. The platform is used to manage media assets by the “top 20 gaming companies” in China. Three major accounts pay more than $200,000 per year for customized and privately deployed services. Big companies may be reluctant to upload their valuable art assets to third parties, so the platform also supports private hosting. The founder says that the company has ten other customers who subscribe to its subscription service.