Super Flash Hao Keming: Mobile Flash web games are in a new blue ocean era

This is an era of universal entertainment. The explosion of information networks has injected new vitality into the gaming industry. Mobile web games, in particular, are the hottest type of games at the moment and are being sought after by developers and the capital market. Flash games were initially a new form of gaming, and were gradually loved by netizens for their advantages such as easy operation, greenness, no need for installation, and small file size. However, with the rise of handheld devices such as smartphones, the PC web game market has been strongly impacted. How to transplant the perfect experience of PC web games to mobile terminals has become one of the problems faced by mobile game developers.

What is the current status of mobile web games? Are Flash games outdated? What are the needs and pain points of developers? In response to these questions, 51CTO reporters interviewed Hao Keming, CEO of Beijing Chaoshan Software Co., Ltd., who has more than 20 years of experience in the Internet and game industry.

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Chaoshan Software CEO: Hao Keming

Hao Keming is the founder of Beijing Chaoshan. He is proficient in the design and operation of Internet and game products and is a staunch defender and innovator of Flash technology. Entering the era of mobile Internet, Hao Keming led his team to continuously optimize and innovate the underlying technology of Flash for 5 years and successfully created the Mirage mobile web game engine and open platform. The Mirage engine has been verified by the market through many classic mobile games with monthly turnover exceeding 10 million, such as "Battle of Sand City" and "Sweeping Journey to the West".

Why do you want to make mobile games?

The predecessor of Chaoshan Software was mainly engaged in mobile non-smartphone game platforms and product solution providers. In the JAVA era, Chaoshan already had its own independent virtual machine and game engine, with an installed base of about 150 million. However, non-smartphones at that time were not as popular as today's smart phones, and were still relatively independent products. In 2010, their team realized that the era of smart phones was coming, so they cooperated with Huawei to introduce some technologies in the field of smart phones and made some battle games, including some classic copyrighted games. In this process, they found that in the PC field, 75% of the world's games were made by Flash. Flash has become the de facto symbol of the game engine in the PC field. At that time, Flash had occupied 98% of the installed base in the PC field, which can be said to have occupied a nearly dominant position. However, in the mobile phone field, Flash developers did not keep up with the development of this situation. For example, on the iOS platform, Jobs publicly expressed his disapproval of Flash. Adobe itself did not attach much importance to Flash. At the same time, Tencent and foreign social game manufacturers such as Facebook at that time strongly needed interactive connectivity between PC and mobile phones. It was in this context that Chaoshan keenly realized the huge market opportunities, so it started investing in the early research and development of mobile Flash engines in 2010 and solved some of the problems left by Adobe.

Flash and H5

In recent years, mobile Internet has been developing rapidly, and once exceeded the usage rate of traditional PC Internet. All major system providers and browser developers have chosen to support HTML5 technology. So why did Super Flash choose Flash instead of H5? Hao Keming told reporters that they also tried H5 in the R&D stage, but it was subject to many restrictions, such as insufficient performance and lack of development tools.

Flash was born for game development. Flash uses vector technology to create animations, which greatly reduces game resources. Flash has excellent rendering and optimization capabilities for game resources, making it very suitable for developing medium and large games. In addition, its resource transmission feature allows Flash game resources to be downloaded and played at the same time.

Chaoshan Software chose Flash and independently developed the Mirage engine, which continuously optimized and innovated the underlying technology of Flash, making this engine a powerful tool for developing "medium and heavy mobile web games". Currently, it has developed a number of mobile web games using this engine, such as "Sweeping Journey to the West" and "3D Chuan Shen".

Mirage Engine

Mirage engine is a natural topic in the conversation. Hao Keming told reporters that Mirage engine is based on the development of the original Flash underlying engine and is gradually optimized and refined. Based on Adobe Flash, Mirage is a Flash game engine developed specifically for mobile phones. It is a virtual machine-based technology that realizes cross-platform and unified interface specifications.

Mirage uses the AS3 language, which is the development syntax of Flash, and is specially optimized for mobile phones. This is reflected in several aspects: First, the rendering capabilities of mobile phones are incomparable to those of PCs. Mobile phones use OpenGL as the first-layer rendering standard, while Adobe may be more of the DX standard on the PC side. This is their difference. This leads to great differences in memory usage and efficiency tuning. Second, in terms of security, the distribution method and traffic source of APPs on mobile phones determine their controllability. Chaoshan cooperates with browser manufacturers and super APP markets to jointly ensure the security of the game. Third, in terms of adaptation, due to the great differences in mobile phone hardware, especially the serious branching of Android. It is necessary to adapt most mobile phones in advance and then distribute them through different channels. Fourth, in terms of operation, online updates are supported.

Why share

Hao Keming told reporters that the reason for planning to share Mirage engine technology is related to the evolution of technology and the market. Under today's market conditions, channel compatibility is high, and large-scale traffic monetization has become possible. And the monetization of APP also requires better engine technology to support it. It is based on such considerations that Chaoshan decided to take open measures, not only for web game manufacturers, but also for mobile game manufacturers, and even individual developers, so that everyone can freely compete for the blue ocean of mobile web games.

The current situation and prospects of web games

At the end of the interview, Hao Keming talked about his understanding of the current status of the mobile game market and his outlook for its future development. In his opinion, the current mobile web game market is similar to the development status of mobile native APP games in 2012, and is at a stage where it has just begun to sprout and develop. In other words, it is still in a blue ocean position. He expects its development speed to be very fast, faster than the development speed of the terminal game era, faster than the development speed of PC web games, and even faster than the development speed of mobile APP games. He gave an example, saying that it is like APP games just started in 2012, but by 2015 it had reached a very high peak. He believes that due to the maturity of conditions, mobile web games will have a situation where a single game will have a turnover of 100 million yuan in the next one or two years. He is also optimistic about the development scale of the entire industry. He estimates that in the next three years, the entire industry should be able to reach a scale of more than 10 billion yuan. Of course, this also depends on the industry's investment and attention in this regard.