Capture Video Footage & Screenshots From Your Games For Free With WeGame [Windows]

Capture Video Footage & Screenshots From Your Games For Free With WeGame [Windows]:

Capturing videogame footage is a popular pastime, particularly for anyone burning themselves out from playing too many missions in WoW or SW:TOR. Video hosting websites have seen an explosion in the last few years of video game clips, often useful level/mission walkthroughs uploaded by helpful gamers or glorious moments of victory played in a loop for endless reverie.

While there are many ways to capture screenshots from video games, recording video footage isn’t quite as simple. There are two main choices. The first is FRAPS – the choice of pro gamers who want to keep a record of the action from their favourite games, FRAPS is quite expensive for anyone who doesn’t plan to use it regularly.

The second is WeGame. A free alternative, WeGame offers the ability to grab screens and video from games, saving it to your hard drive for you to upload to their own servers or somewhere else entirely, such as YouTube.

What Is WeGame?

Part screenshot and video capture tool and part games store and social network, WeGame is an unusual beast. It fulfills some very useful roles but does so in the most frustrating way. First is its insistence on joining your startup items when you boot Windows. There are only so many apps that you should be granting this sort of permission to. WeGame isn’t really something you want to be hanging around and waiting for when you’re starting your PC or laptop in the morning.

WeGame also has its own social aspect, presented through a slick user interface that pretty much wants to be a YouTube for gamers. It’s an admirable aspiration, but we’ll leave it to you to decide whether you want to embrace the community or keep your clips for personal/YouTube use.

Installing and Configuring WeGame Video Captures

To use WeGame, make sure you have either Windows XP, Vista or 7 installed as your operating system.

You will first have to visit the the website and sign up or use the Connect with Facebook option to become a member. Once you have done this find the Download Client link and get your copy of the application downloaded to your computer and installed. Note that one of the installation options is to run WeGame when you start Windows; you might prefer to disable this for a faster boot time.

After you have installed, run the WeGame application and then use the Scan for Games button to find the titles that you have saved on your PC.

You may find that WeGame downloads an update when run for the first time. Once this has been done, log in with your username and password, click Next and set your preferred hotkey for recording clips (you can change this later via Settings > Videos).

All it takes to start recording footage is to leave the software running in the background and open the game you wish to capture from; you’ll spot that WeGame is active via the green square in the corner so simply tap the shortcut key to start.

Should you find that the clips takes up too much space, use the Settings > Video screen where you can find options to disable or enable recording sound, adjusting the FPS, and even choose a recording mode. Also in this screen you can select a location to save your clips to – you would be advised to choose a drive or partition with plenty of free space!

Conclusion

If you want the best tool for the task of capturing video footage from your favourite games then the obvious choice is spending $30 on FRAPS. However, if you’re only planning on capturing action from a single game it is just as well that WeGame exists. While adding your games to the service isn’t the most user-friendly way of encouraging users to start capturing legendary gaming moments, WeGame fills the “free videogame capture” niche perfectly.

Let us know what you think of it. Do you have a preferred alternative?