Providing more convenience and resources for developers Amazon strongly supports Cocos Engine

At the recently held Cocos 2014 Developer Conference (Autumn), Mr. Zhao Peng, General Manager of Amazon China, accepted media interviews at the conference on issues that developers are most concerned about.

Q: What is the current situation of app stores in the country?

Zhao Peng: Amazon App Store started in China last year. It was initially released together with Kindle and is also compatible with all Android devices. Amazon App Store basically combines the most popular content in the United States with localized content in China. There are about 300,000 applications in the world now, and it has been online for about a year and a half. The feature of the entire App Store is that there are many excellent foreign content, such as some foreign games. Amazon has signed an agreement with them globally, and Chinese users can download excellent foreign games. In addition, we will sell NBA games, which are the first games released globally at the same time. I believe this will give Chinese users a good experience.

Q: Maybe the domestic channels are more chaotic than those abroad. Is the promotion of Amazon China App Store different in China than in other countries around the world?

Zhao Peng: The profit model of the entire Amazon store is not as diverse as that in China. Amazon holds 30% and developers hold 70%, which is completely traditional and exactly the same as Google and Apple. In terms of the promotion of the entire store, we promote it from both the developer and user perspectives. Compared with other local app stores, the greater advantage of the Amazon App Store is that it supports developers to distribute apps globally. As one of the top three global app stores, Amazon already has 300,000 apps worldwide. In the Amazon global ecosystem, there are 244 million active users and nearly 100 million average monthly unique visitors. Such a powerful ecosystem as Amazon provides a global market and stage for Chinese developers. Local business and technical support provide developers with one-stop services, including development support, operation support, device support and marketing promotion.

In terms of user promotion, Amazon has 244 million active users worldwide. The App Store is an important part of the entire Amazon store, so the App Store adheres to the principle of serving existing users well while attracting more new users to enhance the user experience. After the game is launched, users will be asked to rate it from 1 star to 5 stars. Ratings above 4 stars will be used to promote the really good ones to users. It must be good stuff that users accept in order to build momentum. If it is a very bad game, I will pay you a lot of money to promote it, but people will say that the things on Amazon are too rubbish.

Q: Is this Amazon's internal rating?

Zhao Peng: Any user can rate it.

Q: If the rating is high, can it be recommended?

Zhao Peng: Yes, only those with high scores are eligible for recommendation, and we will definitely choose from those with the highest scores.

Q: In what areas will Amazon and Cocos collaborate now?

Zhao Peng: Cocos game engine provides developers with an open-source and free tool for game development, and has a high market share in China. Amazon's goal is to build an ecosystem for game and application development and publishing that benefits developers. Coco's game engine and Amazon's app store are both important components of this ecosystem. We have several areas of cooperation with Cocos. First, we will do deep integration from the engine to the release on the Amazon platform. For developers, as long as they use the Cocos engine, they can automatically publish to the Amazon store with a few simple clicks; second, toolkit cooperation. Amazon has many SDK toolkits, and we hope that these toolkits can be integrated into Cocos, such as Amazon's in-app purchase toolkit, Game Circle service tools, etc., and provide them to developers free of charge after integration. Third, cooperation in developer marketing. Amazon and Cocos have a series of marketing activities such as developer forums, developer salons, and developer courses. We look forward to integrating resources in this area in the next step, and the purpose is also to provide developers with more convenience and resources.

Q: Is there any profit sharing for this?

Zhao Peng: The profit sharing is still done directly between Amazon and developers. There is no such sharing in cooperation with Cocos at the moment because everything is free and service-oriented.

Q: Is it to allow developers to maximize profits?

Zhao Peng: Our current revenue sharing ratio is the industry's most standard 30:70 ratio, especially for domestic channels, where the ratio is different. Amazon cannot say that it does not make money from this, but we are looking at the long term and hope that this system will become active, rather than focusing on making a lot of money right from the start.

Q: What preferential policies are there for Chinese developers to attract them?

Zhao Peng: Two. First, Amazon now has a local team of about 40 people. Because Amazon is the only foreign company that has the qualifications, and because all our servers are in China, local contact is one-to-one for developers. The entire app store has a relatively large localization team in China, and they will provide services to many developers. Second, the Amazon store is global. Amazon has 240 million users worldwide, and about 100 million active users. These users are also completely open to Chinese developers. The Amazon platform can help developers publish to more than 200 countries around the world, including more important markets such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, etc. Today, some developers can earn up to 1 million US dollars a month through the Amazon platform.

Q: Which domestic developers are making better profits on Amazon now?

Zhao Peng: There is a developer called Fun Plus, a Chinese company that mainly targets the US market and uses Amazon's AWS cloud service. They have very good revenue on the Amazon App Store. We hope there will be more such developers in the future.

Q: Now I find that many large domestic channels are distributing some products themselves. Amazon has a lot of traffic. Is this approach acceptable?

Zhao Peng: Existence is reasonable, and there must be some truth to it. It depends on how to strike the right balance. If you publish all your own games, developers will have fewer opportunities. On the other hand, this is also a demonstration of what kind of games you can operate yourself, because if you publish your own games, you may get more benefits from the industry chain. I don't think there is right or wrong, but this is a direction. Amazon itself started to acquire many game companies in 2009, and actually made some first-party and second-party games in the United States, which is a bit similar to other platforms making their own movies.

Q: Does Amazon also bring some good products from abroad to China for distribution?

Zhao Peng: It has not been decided yet. For example, if you buy something you make abroad, it will definitely be exclusive, which is a better choice for consumers. Otherwise, the products in other stores are the same and you can buy them anywhere.

Cocos 2014 Developer Conference (Autumn) is the ninth conference of Cocos Developer Platform, and the theme of the autumn conference is "Great or nothing". Chukong Technology will officially release the "Cocos Developer Platform" at the conference and announce strategic cooperation with several international giants. As the highlight of this conference, Cocos Developer Platform will integrate the developer ecosystem. The Cocos Engine workflow can provide developers with a full set of products and services required in the process of "creativity → game launch → revenue increase", including important strategic products such as Changsi Advertising Platform, Cocos Play, AnySDK, etc.