*The following content has been translated to English from Chinese by Cocos-BCX.

On July 2, Cocos-BCX Founder CHEN Haozhi was invited to the online Ask Me Anything (AMA) session hosted by FIND, a blockchain rating platform in China, to answer some questions from the community.

The following are excellent community questions and answers, collected and edited by Cocos-BCX:

Host: Before we start today’s AMA, I’d like to introduce to you a big name in the game world — CHEN Haozhi.

Haozhi is a serial Internet entrepreneur of 20 years in China. He co-founded joyo.com, latterly been acquired by Amazon, with Lei Jun in 1999, and established Xcar in 2003. In 2011, he led the team to develop the famous mobile game Fishing Joy series.

Cocos is now the most widely adopted game engine in Asia and #2 worldwide by market share under his leadership. And today, he breaks into blockchain industry with Cocos-BCX, committed to providing one-stop solutions for blockchain game developers with the goal of becoming the next generation digital economy platform for games.

Let’s welcome Cocos-BCX Founder CHEN Haozhi to share with us his views on blockchain gaming.

Haozhi: Thanks for your invitation. I’d like to begin by introducing the background of our project. Cocos-BCX is launched based on the community and tools of Cocos engine. It was in 2017 that we began to pay attention to blockchain technology, especially the application of blockchain in gaming industry. However, there was no public chain met with the gaming needs of high-performance, and the market was still in an early stage.

Cocos-BCX’s vision is to assetize the content of the digital world, building a consistent value system between the producers and the consumers. We did not establish a team for blockchain. On the contrary, we have been supporting mobile games, mini games and instant games for a long time. And we announced last week the exclusive cooperation with Huawei to establish a cloud game platform.

As one of the top three game engines in the world and the only all-platform game engine in China, we are the first to provide developers with a game development, running and release environment. Our mission is, first of all, to support developers in the development of quality games, rather than to compromise with the immature blockchain technology by sacrificing performance and user experience. Even so, half of all game DApps in the world today are developed by Cocos game engine and supportive tools.

Then, I’d like to talk about the current game market.

There are about 300,000 categories of in-game items for nearly 1,000 games available on the community market of Steam, the largest online game platform in America. The total number of items available for trading on the market is about 300 million. Each item has an average of about 1,000 pieces online.

The blockchain game we are talking about today essentially refers to the in-game items generated by the non-homogeneous asset standard based on the token economy of blockchain. From the perspective of traditional game developers, it is the application of blockchain technology in gaming, but not the blockchain becoming an independent gaming platform.The number of Bitcoin account addresses may not a patch on the total number of registered users for a normal game in China, let alone the 1 billion installers of Fishing Joy 3 we have developed and operated. Any one Tencent online game has more than 50 million registered users.

In today’s blockchain ecosystem, there are no more than 20 Turing-complete public chains that support the running of DApps, and the total active users are less than 3 million, according to the DApp Activeness Report released by DAppReview on July 1.

Q: What’s the relationship between blockchain and game? Will the blockchain be an independent game platform or trading platform in future?

Haozhi: I will answer this question by the following three questions:

1. Can blockchain games enter the mainstream game market, or be limited to gambling games?

At present, blockchain games are mainly gambling ones. The early Apple game Slot was the biggest category, and although it has become a niche, it is still very profitable. The game released by Tencent, Let’s Catch Demons, was said to be integrated with its Consortium blockchain. And We can imagine that the demon we get in the game is a token. Assume that there are 50 million active players in the game, of which 5 million have won the high-level demons.

At this time, Tencent develops another MMO, or a card or other game that can use these demon Tokens that can exist independently in the Tencent Consortium blockchain. These demons in the users’ wallet can also be used in the new game upon login. Then, the new game will get 5 million high quality, stable players in the shortest time.

Many people worry that game developers are unable to make money through this, while it’s quite the contrary. Because it can reduce the user acquisition cost for the game, and the same item can continue to be used across different games. And with cloud games, players can easily enter the game anytime anywhere on any device, and the life cycle of the game will also be extended. In the end, game developers will benefit the most.

It can be best proved byStadia, the cloud game streaming launched by Google during GDC, and Stadia Games and Entertainment, its new first-party game studio. Google believes this will be a $10 billion business in future.

With 5G technology, the life cycle of cloud game is extended. There will be millions of active users under the single worldview, and users can easily access to the game at any time through a Twitter link. With the underlying blockchain, the value of props, characters, and even accounts will continue to rise with the potential to be traded, preserved, and value-added.

2. Whether it is to put the entire game on chain, or put the in-game items on chain?

The mainstream game market is embracing the concept of blockchain. However, the process of the mainstream game development teams learning and developing with blockchain is much slower. In gaming, blockchain is a critical supportive technology, but not fundamental for the game running environment, hardware and network.

There’s no need for the entire game to be on chain. The same is true to gambling games. The concept of random numbers in gambling games is to replace the offline gambling market with a trustable, transparent and efficient settlement of blockchain technology. This, however, is a long process.

3. If it is to apply blockchain technology to games, are there any suitable game form for it in the early stage?

Therefore, we got the conclusion that to apply blockchain technology to games will be the trend. As for which kind of games is more suitable for the application of blockchain technology, gambling is a good direction, but this is not our original intention.

Esports is not a form suitable for us by now. It is particular about timely judgements on required performance and the balance design, which cannot support the value adding of in-game items. People are looking forward to a blockchain version Minecraft, which we think is an ideal form for blockchain to be applied. However, it’s not the best option in the short term, as the open world game is one of the categories that is extremely difficult to develop. Minecraft, now, has no open economic system and trading system. It is because any kind of function addition is an increase in the development difficulty.

Q: As a public chain project in the game field, how can you maximize your value and how to effectively help developers and investors create value through your positioning?

Haozhi: This question will be answered in the following three aspects.

1. Game developers are used to developing games in LUA and JavaScript.

The C++ of EOS and the Go of ETH, however, are difficult for game developers to learn. Therefore, we decided to support the LUA and JS languages on Cocos-BCX main chain, which allows game developers to develop at a lower barrier.

2. Investment in teams that can submit smart contract codes across multiple public chains.

I don’t know how many of you have ever submitted smart contract codes on TRON, IOST, EOS or NEO. A few days ago, White Matrix, a team we invested, submitted the first IDE interface for Facebook Libra smart contract, becoming the first online code submission tool IDE to support multi-chain smart contract code submission. Last year we made a survey on a lot of game teams, including some game companies with hundreds of staff, none of them can write smart contracts, let alone to debug through the interface of public chain.

3. By investing in DAppReview, developers in China and around the world can know for the first time which blockchain games are most popular, which public chain is with most active users, and which category of game has the largest transaction amount.

Therefore, we may draw a conclusion that the deposit and transaction amount of DApps has exceeded 11 billion US dollars in the first half of 2019. The App Store of Apple had an annual turnover of only $1 billion ten years ago. Therefore, the DApp market is not a concept, but a reality. Even though, we still believe that it is still in its infancy, as large institutions have not yet begun to enter this field, and there remain issues to be resolved such as compliance, less popular of the technology, and the penetration rate of users far lower than that of smartphones 10 years ago.

Q: How do you think about the future game market? What's the positioning of blockchain technology or DLT?

Haozhi: Even though we don’t believe that the final form of blockchain game will be the entire game on-chain (in fact, 60% of DApps today have modules on centralized servers), we will continue to launch DApp games in 2019 to enrich our ecosystem and our partners’ public chains.

In the process of exploring the blockchain game, we have seen oceans of stars and we are also working pragmatically with the most resourceful team in the industry.

It is clear that future games will be built around 5G, cloud games, VR, MR and other technologies. IP-powered game contents can be run on TV, mobile, and AR/MR devices through cloud services. Users of the game will be able to immerse themselves in the game’s scene anywhere at any time.

Today’s traditional game market is to entertain in the virtual game world. VR, AR, and MR enable us to move forward to a higher stage, which is to play games in a virtual world. In the end, with the stability and maturity of token economy, blockchain technology, compliance and performance, the virtual world could be the reality for future generations. To work, get paid, socialize and enjoy in such a world is what I’m very much looking forward to.

Q：How does Cocos-BCX bridging traditional game runtime environment and blockchain? Have you adopted any effective commercial approach for blockchain games?

Haozhi: It’s important for game developers to determine the runtime environment, hardware and development technology before developing any game, which is the basic support we have been providing for developers in the traditional market. Today, we have seen a lot of small and medium-sized developers trying to develop blockchain games, Tencent developing games on its Consortium Chain, and Facebook launching Libra public chain and stablecoin system. In the future, there will be more traditional game developers learning and even trying to develop games with blockchain technology.

However, it is a process to be progressed gradually from the early-stage in-game item generation and management based on blockchain technology, to the mid-stage community operation of game guilds, then to the design of gameplay and economy system based on the token economy. This is where Cocos-BCX could play a role. We expect there will be relatively mature and successful products in one or two years.