Providing cross-platform technical cooperation Microsoft China strongly supports Cocos Engine

At the recently held Cocos 2014 Developer Conference (Autumn), Mr. Zhao Liwei, Technical Advisory Director of Microsoft China's Development Tools and Platform Division, accepted media interviews at the conference on issues that developers are most concerned about.

Q: There has been a lot of news about the Windows Phone system recently. Previously, there was news that there was a lot of cooperation with mobile game companies on games. What new policies will there be for game applications in the Windows Phone system by the end of this year or next year?

Zhao Liwei: A year ago, we had a very unique policy for the Chinese market. At that time, we announced that we would allow self-service billing in the app store for the Chinese market, that is, use third-party billing. Generally, developers can use Microsoft billing, which is in the system development SDK, which is Alipay. If you are making heavy online games, Alipay can be used. If you are making casual games, Alipay seems to be a bit heavy to pay, and people may be more accustomed to using other methods. It is true that the domestic market and the overseas market have very different user consumption behaviors, especially in games. Since October last year, it was announced that all games in the Windows Phone store can use self-service billing, and Microsoft will no longer share the profits with you. If you share the profits based on the use of Microsoft billing, the ratio is 3:7. This is a huge concession to our game developers. Moreover, at that time, the domestic Windows Phone entered the stage of device popularization. From the end of last year to the first half of this year, many domestic games such as Linekong have landed on the Windows Phone platform, including many domestic games in the first half of this year. This morning, Qin Shi Mingyue also mentioned several times that it has recently landed on the Windows Phone platform. From the perspective of games, some well-known domestic works can be found on Windows Phone.

Q: Windows Phone will have some inclination towards some star manufacturers in China. Will Xbox One give incentives to some developers?

Zhao Liwei: Content is definitely an indispensable part of our console game platform, or the most important part. In fact, when we first released it, we could see that some domestic games had already landed on Xbox One. Some games were unimaginable abroad, such as "Fighting Landlords", because in the United States, this console platform is more oriented towards masterpieces such as "Halo", and "Fighting Landlords" is a very national-level game and a game with very Chinese characteristics. We took into account the differences. Although everyone will play cards on TV, we hope to cooperate with domestic game manufacturers to bring some domestic games that meet the preferences of domestic consumers to our console platform. Later, everyone will gradually see that we emphasize quality on the console. Players often go for a few masterpieces. A masterpiece may be played for many years, with a very long life cycle, and the ARP value of console games is very high. So we focus on high quality. The team itself is very optimistic about the console platform, and the company will also be willing to invest in this market for a long time, willing to deepen this market, and be optimistic about this market in the long term. We also choose to cooperate with some domestic platform technology partners. Today, the colleague in charge of development relations at Touch mentioned that they got the Xbox One development machine. In the future, Touch will also invest to better connect the Cocos engine with our platform.

Q: You mentioned the browser. Is there any traffic from the browser to the Windows Phone app store? Your browser should also have a mobile version.

Zhao Liwei: Our Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 both use IE11.

Q: Is there any traffic import to Windows Phone App Store through this browser?

Zhao Liwei: Traffic import is not something that our platform company pays special attention to or will do. We used to provide some browser technologies to help some content providers promote their applications. Two years ago, when we talked about Windows 8 development, we mentioned that if you release an application in the Windows 8 App Store and also provide a web version, when you access the web version of the application or game, we have a technology in the browser that can prompt your users that we have an App Store version of the same content to download, and you can jump to the App Store to download it with just one click. This morning, I also emphasized that some of our cooperation with Touch will emphasize cross-platform. From the perspective of Microsoft's recent overall trend, cross-platform may be reflected in similar cooperation with Touch. Touch itself is a very good partner for us to provide cross-platform technology. All developers can develop independently based on Cocos, and in the future, they can publish games and applications on different platforms. Browsers are also very good cross-platform technologies. We will also cooperate with companies that specialize in browsers and Web-related engines and platforms. In the next few years, with the improvement of our mobile terminal performance, cost reduction, bandwidth increase, and especially the improvement of many new Web technologies, Web applications or some games based on H5 will have a very large market trend on mobile terminals in the future.

In the past, we talked about the cooperation with Touchscreen through the Universal App model. After developing once, it can be released to various devices on the Windows platform, from 5-inch Windows Phone to 50-inch touch screen devices. This includes vertical extension, such as using Touchscreen's new server-side solution, which can call the API on our cloud platform, that is, the API on the PaaS platform. Games developed based on Cocos will be released to our cloud platform in one stop in the future. This is a great benefit for many domestic developers. Small domestic developer teams have some strong designers or some strong artists on the front end, but may not have strong technical personnel or operation and maintenance capabilities on the server side of the back end. Our good cooperation with Touchscreen can help these teams. In the future, when these teams go overseas, Microsoft itself is a global cloud service provider, and it is also the first to enter China. We have an operating license and officially operate in China. It was launched in March this year. If you use Microsoft Azure cloud services as your backend in China, when you go overseas in the future, you don’t need to change anything in the whole set of things, and you can directly use many of the original codes.

Cross-platform based on a certain front-end technology will be the main trend on mobile terminals in the future, whether it is for applications or games.

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.