It’s been about four months since YC alum Kamcord first opened its mobile game recording SDK to eager developers, and the team seems to have picked up quite a bit of steam since then. Today, Kamcord announced that it has raised a total of $1.5 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Tencent, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, just to name a few.
The number of games that have tapped Kamcord for dead-simple screen recording has more than doubled since the company’s official launch earlier this year, and the number of people actually using the feature has seen a similar boost. Just two weeks ago, players of Kamcord-enabled games were recording three gameplay videos per second. Now that number has jumped to seven, and Kamcord CEO Matt Zitzmann seems confident that use of the recording SDK will only continue to pick up traction.
“We’ve been talking to a lot of game developers these days,” he said. “There’s an understanding that this is going to be a core piece of functionality, and we’re hopeful that we’ll continue to see this kind of growth.”
If nothing else, there’s plenty of headroom there for Kamcord to grow. There’s been an explosion of game-related video content surging around the web these past few years — Machinima’s stable of content creators alone generated 1.6 billion views for YouTube last April, and big streaming services like Hulu have recently begun making overtures toward the gaming community.
To date though, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the mobile side of gaming, but Kamcord thinks it can change all that with its approach to recording gameplay. Players of Kamcord-powered games can easily share their exploits on YouTube, which effectively serves two purposes — to stroke their (probably healthy) egos, and to spread the word of a game they found interesting enough to download and play. I got the chance to play with a handful of Kamcord-friendly titles back in August, and the results were nothing short of impressive considering just how little impact the recording process had on gameplay.
And now the big question: what exactly do CEO Zitzmann and his colleagues plan to do with that fresh infusion of capital? Well, handling payroll for the founding team for one, but Zitzmann is also looking to flesh out Kamcord’s ranks a bit more (hint hint: they’re in the market for a designer) before “locking down the team” for 2013.
Of course, there’s one major gaming frontier that the Kamcord team haven’t tackled just yet: Android. Don’t think it’s out of lack of interest though — with a small team like the one running the show at Kamcord, Zitzmann says they’re very careful when it comes to allocating their engineering resources. For now the big priority is getting the iOS version of the SDK as clean and as usable as possible, but I’m told that “Android is definitely going to be a priority” in the coming year.