Cocos-BCX: Empowering Innovations in Blockchain Gaming

Next-Gen Digital Game Economy. Game engine, IDE and blockchain for decentralized game development.

What is Cocos?

It has been 11 years since Cocos was founded in Los Cocos, Argentina, in 2008. Originally, it started as a game development engine for mobile applications, which evolved into today’s Creator, as we kept on designing additional tools to incorporate within it, since 2012.

Currently, Cocos game engine supports all-platform game development including PS4, Xbox One and PC . Globally the reputable developers we are aware of using Cocos game engine include Bigfish, Zynga, EA, Tencent, NetEase, Ketchapp, Ubisoft, DENA, etc. Out of all games developed by Tencent and NetEase, over 40% and 60% respectively are developed based on Cocos. The most well known one among these is Kniver Out, a game similar to PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS.

Cocos has high market shares in Asian and Eastern European regions, due to the local game development habits and market factors. Cocos has been open source since the very beginning. It has always offered free game development environment, which enabled small and medium-sized teams to develop lightweight games with high speed, high quality and low cost. Especially in Japan, there’s a large user base involved in card games and casual games. Since 2013, thanks to the the rapid development of mobile games, many big MMO games, including part of 3D games, also started to use Cocos.
Comparing to market shares of Unreal and Unity in the USA, Cocos enjoys much higher market shares in regions including Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe with 1.3 million developers worldwide.
In 2018, with the release of Mini Games and Instant Games on WeChat and Facebook , Cocos Engine and Tools ranked number 1 by utilization rate within these two platforms. The main reason is that until today both Unity and Unreal Engine are not able to support these two platforms. It is also due to the advantage of architecture behind Cocos that made it possible.. At Cocos, we put a lot of effort into making the framework and product structure light-weight. Nowadays, major companies including Huawei, OPPO, VIVO, Samsung and Baidu are all using the runtime environment and frameworks provided by Cocos for mini games. To some extent, Cocos platform is natively fit for the operation of blockchain games.

Let us have a look at the top-earning games in Japan, India and China. Employing a Unity engineer with 2-year development experience costs around 40k USD per year, while a Cocos engineer costs only 25k USD. In China, every year there will be 20k graduates who have studied Cocos development program coming out to the market. Meanwhile in Japan, Cocos Creator development courses are already opened in primary schools.

This diagram shows the market share of instant game engines.

Cocos accounts for 53% on WeChat (instant game). WeChat instant game is largely different from that of Facebook. WeChat utilizes a Runtime solution provided by Cocos , which has performance similar to native game operating environment.

By 2018, total income of WeChat instant games has already achieved 1 billion USD, with game submissions from nearly 10k developer teams. In 2019, China mini game market will reach a total turnover of 3 billion USD.

The reason behind such rapid growth is mainly due to Huawei, OPPO, VIVO, Samsung have already started to support instant game. And Facebook instant game is of H5 game standard, which cannot support the operation of many other game categories.

These are our long-term partners and some CPs in cooperation, among which Qualcomm is one of our investors.

In 2017, We started paying attention to and getting involved in blockchain. The reasons are twofold.

We officially entered the mobile games industry in 2010, only in 2012 the mobile games market started to gain profit and scale in user base. In 2014, we started the development of instant game runtime environment, but only in 2018 it began to support the operation of this new users and technical platform.

We believe preliminary preparations and technical reserves are of most importance for blockchain gaming.
Game streaming is the trend of product format for current game market, and game subscription will be a major revenue model. Props trading will continuously arise in popularity. For example, the total in-game payment in China market is 30 billion USD, while the annual props trading is only 3 billion USD. However , we saw in 2018 that, the props trading on Ethereum, EOS and TRON has reached 5 billion USD, while the in-game payment is less that 500 million USD. This shows the scale of blockchain game trading is 100 times that of traditional market.

blockchain game props trading volume in 2019 (EOS, Ethereum, Tron)

blockchain games props trading volume in Q1 2019 (EOS, Ethereum, Tron)

Let’s take a look at the figures of Q1 2019, game props trading on blockchain (EOS, Ethereum, Tron) reached 2.8 billion USD, which is ten times the amount of Q1 2018. So it is expected that in the future blockchain games, props trading will be the major business model. In the digital asset trading market there may even emerge mega-sized trading platform that exceeds the traditional e-commerce platforms such as eBay and Taobao.

Therefore, in the process of integrating blockchain technology and adding support for non-homogenous game assets , we’ve been doing lots of preparation to enable high performance, low cost of contract development and execution for games on blockchain. Over the first half of 2019, Cocos will complete the official deployment and launch of the main net, expecting many developers joining the testing and product development. We hope to provide support for the development of the blockchain game industry, just like what we have done for mobile gaming and instant games in the past.

Google has just announced their launch of cloud game streaming during GDC. In China, we are also collaborating with major cloud service operators, to test and build platforms for cloud games.

Game industry evolves with continuous iteration of the user platform and the technology platform. To bring gamers unprecedented experience is the lifelong pursuit of us all working in the gaming industry.

End.

To know more about Cocos-BCX, check below important links:

Cocos-BCX Alpha Testing Now Opens to Developers Globally!

Technical documentation: https://doc.cocosbcx.io/

Github: https://github.com/Cocos-BCX

Cocos-BCX introduction video：