Puzzle & Dragons enters China market, why did it give up self-development and choose Cocos engine?

The only authorized Chinese version of the popular Asian card game Puzzle & Dragons has finally started testing. Although it is late, it still has great appeal. In just a few days, it has attracted a large number of players to download it and received rave reviews.

As we all know, in the ever-changing mobile game market, speed has long been a major ironclad principle for many manufacturers to compete for the market. However, since Gungho officially announced in December last year that Puzzle & Dragons would be exclusively distributed by Tencent, there has been no further news. Unlike other products that are scrambling to seize the Chinese market, why did Puzzle & Dragons have to wait for so long before it was released?

Gungho CEO Morishita

We can find the answer to this from the product launch conference of Gungho and Tencent. Gungho CEO Morishita Yuki once said, "Although we will retain the basic gameplay of Puzzle & Dragons, it is not an exaggeration to describe it as a remake." It turns out that in order to overcome the frequent acclimatization problems of Japanese mobile games, Gungho and Tencent are ready to carefully polish this gem. Although deep localization can guarantee the quality of fine products, the workload can be imagined. From the perspective of pursuing maximum efficiency and reducing time costs, the Chinese version of Puzzle & Dragons abandoned the original self-developed engine and adopted the open source engine Cocos, which currently has the largest market share in China.

According to the survey data of the "2014-2015 China Android Phone Market Research Report" by the Internet Consumer Research Center, the number of Android models on the market in China fluctuates between 900 and 1,100, and is growing. In addition, China's network environment and mobile phone hardware configuration are quite different from those in Japan, so the model matching and debugging of "Puzzle & Dragons" may become an unbearable burden for the team. The main reason why Tencent and Gungho decisively chose Cocos this time should be that they valued the powerful Android compatibility of the Cocos engine itself.

It is reported that Cocos engine has become the open source engine with the best Android compatibility performance on the market, with an Android adaptation rate of nearly 99.5%, which is almost the highest. Cocos engine helps the Puzzle & Dragons team focus on the localization of the game content itself, reducing the tedious compatibility and adaptation rate work as much as possible. Therefore, we can see that Puzzle & Dragons has put a lot of effort into the localization of the game, and various settings familiar to domestic players have been added, such as daily sign-in, ranking copies, VIP, sweeps, pet fragments, etc., so that players can fully enjoy the wonderful sparks produced when fancy elimination meets the cultivation of divine pets.

This is not the first time that the Cocos engine has helped Japanese national mobile games enter overseas markets. From the popular two-dimensional game "Diffusive Million Arthur" to the card masterpiece "Brave Frontier" and the action game "Monster Strike", all of them are developed using the Cocos engine. Keisuke Hata, the technical director of Square Enix, the developer of "Diffusive Million Arthur", once praised the Cocos engine in an interview: "As an engine, Cocos is very lightweight and has really improved efficiency."

To effectively solve industry problems and help developers to start with ease has been one of the biggest goals of Cocos since its birth. The Cocos team has been working tirelessly to eliminate widespread pain points such as difficulty in version upgrades, cumbersome multi-channel packaging, cross-platform, compatibility, and performance. Born for mobile games and professional because of focus, this is Cocos' unchanging promise. Let us look forward to the Chinese version of Cocos's high-quality "Puzzle and Dragons" reaching new heights.