“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The famous saying in a historical novel by Charles Dickens is also true to the current game industry.

Technology exploration by human beings enables the science fiction films like 20000 Leagues Under the Sea to be presented to us in the form of game, such as the ocean-style game Fishing Joy available since 2011.

However, it’s also a time full of challenges. The game industry in China enters Red Ocean where enterprises crowded at the top of the industry; A variety of entertainments are there occupying people’s time for games; And the development of game industry in China hit a bottleneck. Fortunately, there are still some in the game industry haven’t stopped exploring new forms of games.

On June 17th, the 8th Global Game Congress hosted by Global Mobile Game Confederation (GMGC) was held in Beijing. CHEN Haozhi, CEO of Beijing Chukong Technology and Chairman of Xiamen Yaki Software — the parent company of Cocos Engine, shared some major milestones of Cocos engine and discussed the possible chemical reactions of Cocos engine combining with cloud games, AI, VR and even blockchain in the 5G era, under the theme of Driving the Digital Content Industry with Technology.

Cocos engine: 1.3 million developers across more than 200 countries and regions, covering 1.1 billion players

The global game industry is now nearly 40 years old, and it also has seen a history of more than 20 years in China. In the course of 40-year development, games have evolved from single player games to online games, from client-games to web games and then to mobile games. Today, blockchain games, VR games, and cloud games are available.

In this process, the gaming technology is constantly iterating, so are the user’s choices. Therefore, the engine should be prepared before the new changes start.

Cocos engine starts with the native mobile game era in 2011. From 2011 to 2014, Cocos engine helped many game companies transit smoothly from client-games and web games to the mobile games by supporting the Lua language. Many mobile game companies made great success with the help of Cocos engine.

From 2015 to 2018, the Cocos engine helped some small and medium-sized teams to earn their places in the industry by supporting JS language and Html 5 technology.

In 2015, Cocos engine launched Runtime technology. Based on similar technology architecture, WeChat released mini games at the end of 2017. Now, Cocos Runtime is serving many major mobile phone manufacturers and popular apps in China and overseas to build a mini game ecosystem. In 2019, Runtime-based mini games, micro-end model products, advertising income and top-up revenues exceeded RMB 10 billion.

As for Cocos engine, by the end of May 2019, Cocos engine had 1.3 million registered developers worldwide, reaching as far as more than 200 countries and regions and covering 1.1 billion terminal player devices.

CHEN said that in the past, Cocos engine centred more on higher development efficiency and lower development cost. Today, with the emergence of new technologies, the Cocos engine is hoping to promote the efficiency of the digital content industry through technology.

Cocos Engine in its 8th Year: Stay true to our mission with more innovative technologies including cloud gaming

In the past two years, the development of the game industry has run into some difficulties.

At the same time, as the rapid development of the mobile Internet, information, video, shopping and other forms of entertainments began to occupy users’ time and energy. The games that need to be downloaded are no longer preferred. The customer acquisition cost for games is increasing, the cost of traffic is rising, while the number of users is significantly decreasing.

“In this year, however, the game market again attracts great attention, a key point behind which is the concept of cloud games based on 5G technology.” CHEN said, “the instant play content interface of cloud games can also take advantage of today’s content display based on information flow.

CHEN analyzed the possibilities of cloud games from four aspects:

Cloud games have lifted the technical limitations in the mini game era;

Cloud games allow games of any category and quality to run directly on the data rate, in a form similar to video, where the player passes back simple low-latency operational information through the interface.

Cloud games allow millions of people to be in the same world, even within the same set of servers;

Millions of or even more users may bring longer game life cycle, a more open economic system, and more contents to meet the demand.

In future, game streamers can bring players to their chapter, world, and guild interfaces directly;

Cloud games feature instant play that players can access to any scenes and levels of the game at any time in theory with all logic running in the clouds. This will bring about a huge change not only in the promotion mode but also in the way play in teams. Players can also join the battle whenever they receive an invitation from a friend.

In the era of cloud gaming, VR head-mounted display will be more popular than today’s mobile phones.

The game industry is evolved on the basis of player experience. VR devices can bring real immersion to games and interactions, as pictured in the film of Ready Player One. However, due to the development of the industry and the cost of devices, it may take another 3 years.

Cocos engine, which has been tried in mini games, now reached cooperation with China Unicom on the development of 5G innovation, and officially released a cloud game solution jointly with Huawei Cloud.

CHEN said that the cloudization of game content by the Cocos engine will greatly reduce the user acquisition cost, and even bring those who do not play games into the game industry.

As for the entire digital content industry, CHEN expected that in the 5G era, there will be a great leap forward of the scale of the digital content industry based on cloud games, AI, and even blockchain technology. “We expect that the scale of digital content industry including games, education and interactive content based on 5G networks will exceed $150 billion in 2025.”

“We spent eight years insisting on the implementation of Cocos engine to promote, support and maintain the Chinese game ecosystem.”

“Now in the cloud game arena, Cocos engine will stay true to our mission, and hope that in the future, more peers will be willing to join us and support our persistence.”