The first major event in 2022 is Microsoft's announcement of a $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which is seen as the starting point of Microsoft's entry into the meta-universe in the history of games, of course, from the position of pure consumer side. In fact, Microsoft has been in the AR field for a long time, the significance of AR to the metaverse does not have to be expanded, Hololens 2 is still the best AR device at present, and has received a $20 billion super order.
A week earlier, on January 10, Take-Two, also a giant in the game industry, announced that it would acquire social game company Zynga for $12.7 billion, a deal that was shocking enough.
In just one week, there have been a series of historical blockbuster deals in the same field, whether it is the elephant turn of the tech giant or the track players huddled together to warm up, the deep reasons are thought-provoking.
Web3 represented by Metavalse is about to come to fruition, entertainment, social, fashion, games, competition and even B-side collaborative office, artificial intelligence, etc., any track with content as the carrier will face earth-shaking changes.
If you take the establishment of Yahoo and the release of iPhone as the iconic starting point of Web1 and Web2 respectively, and briefly comb through the brief history of the Internet, you can find that the systemic opportunities of the whole industry are about ten to fifteen years as a cycle.
In an interview with Chen Haozhi, chairman of domestic business engine Cocos, 36Kr can clearly feel the excitement of the imminent systemic opportunities in the Web3 era. Moreover, Cocos's accumulation and thinking in the era of mobile Internet are of great reference value for how to meet the changes in the Web3 era.
Real-time 3D is one of the basic features of Web3, 2D started Cocos another way, its 3D engine gives full play to the characteristics of real-time rendering, cross-platform, from the bottom to open up the engine + chip, engine + OS cooperation and ecology, become adaS, HMI, XR, virtual people and even an important player in the field of architecture and home design.
Cocos Engine Works Demo
About Cocos
As a presence that can compete with Unreal Engine and Unity in the field of games and content production, Cocos is not only the only domestic engine among the three major game engines, but also has an international team configuration, such as Zynga's early employee Ricardo Quesada was the chief architect of the Cocos team. The Cocos engine has documentation in English, which also lays the foundation for its globalization.
As an open source project on Github, Cocos has accumulated 30,000 + stars and 10,000 + forks, which is also the top stream of domestic open source software. Since its inception, Cocos has 1.5 million registered developers worldwide, in more than 203 countries and territories around the world, and covers more than 1.6 billion end devices.
Founded in 2010, Cocos is at the forefront of the world's digital interactive content development platforms, Cocos Creator is an efficient, easy-to-use cross-platform interactive digital content development engine under Cocos, as an influential open source engine on a global scale, not only has a complete game development tool, but also meets a full range of creative needs.
Cocos Ecology
Looking at Cocos from a traditional industry perspective, it undoubtedly enjoyed the dividends of the mobile Internet in the earliest days.
But looking to the future, Web3 is still full of uncertainty, imagine the remote collaborative office platform in 2 years, maybe Meta's Horizon Workrooms, maybe Google's Starline, maybe a few dark horses.
Tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Meta can't make an accurate bet on Web3, and 36Kr hopes to find some opportunities for the next generation of the Internet in the subtleties of the conversation with Chen Haozhi.
From the game to the metaverse, the unity is renewed
In 2021, from Roblox defining the metaverse in the prospectus, to Facebook's high-profile renaming Meta, the metaverse has been on fire for a whole year, everything can be metaverse, and if several metaverse trademarks are not registered, it may be abandoned by the times.
If the obscure concept is set aside, it can be seen from Roblox's definition that the metacosm is roughly equal to a large collection of games and game derivative businesses. For games, real-time 3D interaction is a fundamental feature, and has been the case for two decades; not for the Internet, the biggest difference is that from games to metaversities, end users may be amplified by two or three orders of magnitude.
Chen Haozhi told 36Kr that the meta-universe has become the most suitable scene for the game industry, technology and talents to migrate. Although the meta-universe has been over-hyped since 2021, it does not affect the low-key development and continuous accumulation of entrepreneurial teams, including domestic Internet manufacturers are rapidly promoting the productization of the meta-universe concept, such as Tencent Super QQ Show, Baidu Xi'an, NetEase Yaotai, Ali Yuanjing.
Whether it's a game or a metaverse, the business engine is undoubtedly the most important technical base. Once the top game companies will use self-developed engines, but the commercial engine market has grown rapidly in the past decade, and the rapid growth brought about by the open ecosystem is filling the technical barriers of closed doors.
Cocos Engine Works Demo
From the perspective of globalization, from the perspective of globalization, from the perspective of cross-platform, cross-terminal, cross-domain, toolset, key capabilities and workflow integration and other multi-dimensional considerations, there are only three business engines with a complete developer ecosystem in the world. In the prospectus of its IPO in 2020, Unity stated that the international mobile business engine had only 2 competitors, of which Cocos was first and Unreal Engine was second. From the perspective of market share, in the top 1,000 Android + iOS revenue of global mobile games + interactive content in 2020, Unity accounts for 51%, Cocos 20%, Unreal Engine 2.7%, China's unity accounts for 50%, cocos 45%.
In the era of mobile Internet, the content and game development process has undergone very big changes, large manufacturers are competing to build industrial pipelines, and the meta-universe is currently changing the game once again becoming a stage for players to play games.
The first is the replacement of mobile terminals, although XR devices and mobile phones are coexisting for a long time, or gradual replacement is not yet conclusive, but the dawn of VR and AR devices has begun to appear.
Metaverse universe scenarios require a large number of core technologies, whether it is digital people, virtual scenes, large map generation tools or server architecture, AI capability frameworks, communication frameworks, etc., all of which put forward new requirements and challenges for business engines and tool-based scenarios.
The key to the card bit universe is the scale and cross-platform capabilities of the developer ecosystem. The metaverse, especially in the early days, will span more development platforms, operating systems, and application areas than the mobile Internet, and also raises more problems for business engines to solve.
In this regard, Cocos' global developer ecosystem of more than one million may become an important resource for content production from PGC to UGC and even AIGC.
Chen Haozhi said: Cocos regards the metacostem as an important node, and the opportunity lies in both infrastructure and the integration of key capabilities. Cocos has also worked with partners to build and reserve tools, services, and capability frameworks, and in mid-2022, Cocos Meta-Universe Scenario Solution will achieve key scenario landings.
From the metaverse to Web3 is targeted
If the metacosm is more C-sided, then Web3 contains the B-side of the metacosm.
Web3 is also difficult to define, paradigm shift and other strange words appear frequently, reference mobile Internet from the first signs, to the dividend gradually disappeared, smart phones, Pad and other mobile terminals are representative, but the upgrade of various underlying technologies from the previous decade of the era of feature phones accumulation, IBM and other traditional IT giants built the infrastructure of cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS can form a tide to promote the digital transformation of enterprises.
Cocos Engine Works Demo
Web3 is no longer a castle in the sky, Chen Haozhi said: In the next few years, we will see several fundamental changes in the IT, communications, and Internet markets: 1) the computing paradigm and architecture will migrate from X86+NVIDIA to ARM-based clusters; 2) communications will migrate from 5G to 6G; 3) mobile terminals will be replaced by XR devices; 4) people in the virtual world, including living, working, playing, and socializing will even exceed the real world.
Around 2025 will become an important time node, when the real explosion of cutting-edge technologies such as AR/VR and autonomous driving will be completed with the deployment of 6G and new cloud computing architectures.
New application areas also bring unprecedented opportunities, especially in resonance with industry 4.0 changes such as smart cars and AIoT. Through toB and ToC scenarios such as intelligent cockpits, intelligent hardware, virtual conferences, and collaborative offices, the growth wheel of industry and users spirals is formed.
Whether it is Industry 4.0, or various intelligent hardware in B-end and C-end application scenarios, as long as there is a display, there must be an interactive interface and a business engine. Unlike the volume of pure C-end scenes such as games and pan-games, behind each industrial-grade scene is a trillion-scale market.
In the context of the Internet of Everything, to create a virtual terminal interconnected world, the people, devices, scenes organically linked together, has become the goal pursued by many manufacturers, to this end, Huawei Hongmeng to create a complete application development ecology for all scenarios, Cocos also chose to cooperate with Huawei in an all-round way, becoming the world's first cross-platform graphics rendering engine that supports HarmonyOS.
Chen Haozhi introduced that Cocos supports multi-device collaboration of Hongmeng system, which will not only bring a new interaction mode, but also discover new development opportunities in the Field of IoT and other fields. Moreover, Cocos is currently the only domestic cross-platform engine, following the path of localization innovation, providing alternative security solutions for developers in a large number of key areas.
Cocos has cooperated with Huawei Hongmeng to become the world's first business engine to support HarmonyOS
As the underlying basic tool and software, Cocos not only serves the smart cockpit scenario of domestic OEMs, but also has been recognized by American and European car manufacturers, which is also a major progress made by commercial engines in the past in the field that is difficult to reach. The smart cockpit, like XR terminals and smart hardware, has created a rigid demand for 3D interactive content, lightweight frameworks, and efficient and low-cost development tools.
With the multiplication of the frequency of product replacement, the demand demand side of the B-side such as OEMs is constantly improving, and the dimensions of visual effects, interaction capabilities, differentiation, development efficiency, lightweight, etc., all require the business engine to improve its own agile performance.
At present, Cocos has built an intelligent cockpit PaaS service platform serving OEMs, Tier 1, and Connected Vehicles enterprises, and multimodal interactive intelligent cockpit products based on cocos 3D rendering engines will also be launched.
From Web3 back to the business engine Content is king of collaboration symbiosis
Web3 and metaverses require massive, multi-source, heterogeneous, high-quality content, and the power of productivity tools is imminent.
Looking back at the cycle and every hot spot of the previous two generations of the Internet, we have experienced the Gartner curve from concept to bubble, from bubble to cooling off period, and then to accumulation and rising. Web3, metaverse will not be an exception, because the Internet is built in a completely open technology-driven environment, only if the degree of attention is highly concentrated, there will be a large number of investment in the market, through capital + technology, drive innovative enterprises in the subdivision field to quickly achieve productization, marketization, and then guide user habits, establish business models, and finally achieve a virtuous circle of investor withdrawal.
Cocos Engine Works Demo
Chen Haozhi said: If we go back to 2014, we really dare not imagine that the commercial engine market will have such a large scale.
In the middle and early stages of the mobile Internet era, from the perspective of primary and secondary markets, the business engine is still a marginal role.
In 2013, Unity's financing valuation for nine years was $350 million; in 2012, Tencent invested in Epic (Unreal Engine's parent company) at $330 million, accounting for 40%, corresponding to Epic's valuation of $825 million, and Unreal has been an independent engine company for 15 years. By 2021, Unity will have a maximum market capitalization of $55 billion for just one year; unlisted Epic financing will be valued at $30 billion (not just the business engine part, but also the higher-valued Fortnite).
The number of players on the commercial engine track is not large, and the playing style is not the same. And for the future, whether it is a game, a pan-game or a non-game, from the perspective of application and content, the boundaries between each other will become more and more blurred. As cloud computing, cloud rendering, and XR gradually break through the current bottlenecks, the business engine may explode even more.
Referring to the era of mobile Internet, the traditional design software company Adobe has not been depressed by the rise of cloud-native era design SaaS upstarts such as Canva and Figma, and has transformed and expanded its ecology and cooperation in a timely manner to make it still invincible, and its revenue and market value have maintained rapid growth.
In the future, the business engine is bound to efficiently open up the IaaS layer; improve the capabilities of the PaaS layer and connect more application areas; and use diversified SaaS to reach more application groups and consolidate ecology and cooperation.
From the dimensions of tooling, rendering capabilities and server-side deployment, Cocos can more easily deploy and iterate its own services and capabilities on the one hand, paaS, on the other hand, seek the most leading partners in various fields, jointly create scenes that meet market demand, and create a spiraling process.
In this spiraling development process, Cocos and Huawei, domestic chip manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, platform manufacturers and foreign partners including Qualcomm, ARM, BlackBerry, etc. are also entering a new upward period.
Chen Haozhi said: The B round of financing has ended, and Cocos will also launch a new round of financing. In the next few years, we hope to catch up with Unreal in terms of the ability to render and reconstruct the real world, and output to global developers and commercial customers in the ability to build smart cockpits, IoT markets, MR in XR, and AR content, thus seizing the key scenarios of the next generation of the Internet.
In the metaverse scenario, Cocos plays the role of lowering the threshold for application
Attached: The following is the transcript of an interview between 36Kr and Cocos CEO Chen Haozhi (excerpted)
36Kr: Cocos completed series B financing, the main purpose of this financing? What are some of the business scenarios to focus on in the next phase?
Chen Haozhi: Cocos is currently investing in rendering capabilities, server-side capabilities and productization, support for different commercialization scenarios, and development of special tools. Specifically, it includes digital people, digital scenes, XR, smart cockpits, virtual training and simulation. Compared with overseas competitors, Cocos is still in the accumulation stage and needs to maintain awe, but in some areas we already have an advantage.
Series B has ended and Cocos will launch a new round of funding. In the next few years, we hope to catch up with Unreal in terms of the ability to render and reconstruct the real world, and output to global developers and commercial customers in the ability to build smart cockpits, IoT markets, MR in XR, and AR content, thus seizing the key scenarios of the next generation of the Internet.
36Kr: It is easy to understand that traditional game engines extend to digital people, XR and other fields, but how to land in industrial scenarios such as IoT and production line reconstruction? The smart cockpit seems to have become a must-fight for engines, what is the current situation?
Chen Haozhi: First of all, The IoT is not only widely used in industrial scenarios, but also includes various intelligent hardware in C-end scenarios, whether it is a large screen, a watch, or a fitness equipment, as long as there is an interactive interface, the engine must be used.
Huawei Hongmeng provides an all-scenario application development ecosystem, Cocos chose to fully cooperate with Huawei, becoming the world's first cross-platform graphic rendering engine supporting HarmonyOS, supporting multi-device collaboration of Hongmeng system, which will not only bring new interaction modes, but also discover new development opportunities in IoT and other fields. Cocos is currently the only domestic cross-platform engine, along the path of localization innovation, providing alternative security solutions for developers in a large number of key areas.
As an underlying basic tool and software, Cocos not only serves the smart cockpit scenario of domestic OEMs, but also has been recognized by American and European car manufacturers, which is also our biggest progress in the past two years. The smart cockpit, like XR terminals and smart hardware, has rigid requirements for 3D interactive content, lightweight frameworks, and efficient and low-cost development tools.
At present, Cocos has built an intelligent cockpit PaaS service platform serving OEMs, Tier 1, and Connected Vehicles enterprises, and multimodal interactive intelligent cockpit products based on cocos 3D rendering engines will also be launched.
Once, because of its heavy structure, Unreal could not adapt to the characteristics of small storage space and insufficient performance of mobile devices in the early days of the mobile Internet, and was used by Unity to develop and grow during this window period. Today, smart cockpit HMIs, ADAS, and in-car entertainment scenes also face the contradiction between limited computing power and multi-screen, high-resolution, and complex interactions. Cocos Runtime has become the industry default standard in lightweight operating environments and the first choice for smooth, 3D, efficient and low-cost tools for multi-source, heterogeneous devices.
36 Kr: How does Cocos see the metacosm? Now, groups such as the media and investors are clearly polarizing their attitudes toward the metacosm.
Chen Haozhi: Although the meta-universe in 2021 has been over-hyped, it has not affected the low-key development and continuous accumulation of entrepreneurial teams. Domestic Internet giants are rapidly promoting the concept of meta-universe productization, such as Tencent Super QQ Show, Baidu Xi'an, NetEase Yaotai, and Ali Yuanjing.
The metaverse has become the most suitable scenario for the game industry, technology and talents to migrate.
Metaverse scenarios require a large number of core technologies, whether it is digital people, virtual scenes, large map generation tools or server architecture, AI capability framework, communication framework, etc., all of which put forward new requirements and challenges for engines and tool-based scenarios. Unity and Unreal have previously acquired a large number of layout libraries, asset trading platforms, digital people, and server-side capabilities.
Cocos sees the metacosm as an important node, and the opportunity lies in both infrastructure and the integration of key capabilities. Cocos has also worked with partners to build and reserve tools, services, and capability frameworks, and in mid-2022, Cocos Meta-Universe Scenario Solution will achieve key scenario landings.
36Kr: What are the key technology areas worth paying attention to in the future, and what needs to be broken?
Chen Haozhi: In the next few years, we will see several fundamental changes in the IT, communication, and Internet markets: 1) the computing paradigm and architecture will migrate from X86+NVIDIA to ARM-based clusters, and the recent cloud service provider IaaS layer capability output and hardware deployment can already see the trend; 2) communication migration from 5G to 6G, from the low latency and high bandwidth of 5G to the stable and ultra-low latency transition of 6G, real-time holographic video conferencing for light field modeling has become possible 3) Mobile terminals are replaced by XR devices; 4) People in the virtual world, including living, working, playing, and socializing, will even exceed the real world.
2025-2028 will be an important time node, when the real outbreak of AR and autonomous driving should be accompanied by the completion of 6G deployment.
36Kr: Starting from the engine, how do you see the similarities and differences between AR and VR? If AR and VR are the entrance to the metaverse, what capabilities do the engine need to provide?
Chen Haozhi: Cocos believes that VR only accounts for about 20% of the entire XR field, vr is a scene of heavy entertainment and heavy work, while relying heavily on rendering and computing power. The core of AR is to render digital content superimposed on top of reality, making lightweight, multi-dimensional spatial display, multi-window, low-power terminals possible. Moreover, AR inherently has AI attributes, which can greatly improve the acquisition dimension of data, so that the AI ability based on user portraits can be improved by an order of magnitude. For engines, whether it is VR or AR, they need to constantly adapt to new computing architectures.
From the perspective of cross-platform and cross-application, the engine should provide all-platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Web, linux, QNX, PS, XBOX) support; cross-domain (games, education, XR, digital people, film and television, simulation) applications, metaverse is the combination of the above multiple fields, the key capabilities of the engine include:
Toolsets and key capabilities are supplied >> cross-end engines (server-side), specialized tools such as education, smart cockpits, XR editors, material libraries, plug-in libraries, etc. Today's tools also require low-code, no-code;
Workflow management >> various upstream simulation data models, 3D models, algorithms, special effects format import, binding, support;
The full-platform output capability >> generate packages for each platform with one click or directly submit them for review.
36 Kr: For commercial engines, will the future of gaming and non-gaming markets be one or the other, or will they go hand in hand?
Chen Haozhi: Cocos has a stricter definition of application scenarios, including pan-game scenarios, game derivative scenarios, and non-game scenarios, and there is no change in the growth trend of any one scene, but the growth rate is different. For example, the game industry will grow from the current 300 billion to 400 billion in a few years; and digital people, as a game derivative scenario, are likely to grow to 300 billion after 2025; and non-game scenarios such as smart cockpits, cultural tourism, and industrial inspection will be trillion-scale markets.
Therefore, regarding the game and non-game markets, we prefer to say that the non-game market is already a larger demand and scenario, and there are many incremental needs. With the recognition of the metaverse by the industry and the market, the core of the next generation of the Internet is real-time, 3D, and spatial, which confirms that the future cloud computing, cloud rendering and XR fields will usher in a greater outbreak. However, in the future, the boundaries between games and non-games may gradually blur.
36Kr: During the dividend period of the mobile Internet era, there are many formats that grow rapidly and die out rapidly, and so are many fields related to business engines, has the metacosm brought a new wave of dividends? Is there a methodology on the Internet cycle that provides a reference for the next generation of the Internet?
Chen Haozhi: Instead of talking about the meta-universe dividend, it is better to say that in the past 20 years of China's Internet, the all-round improvement in penetration rate, mobile Internet equipment penetration rate, mobile payment usage rate and chinese engineer work efficiency is the basis of the next generation of Internet dividends. Metaverse, we are more accustomed to saying that it is the next generation of the Internet, the core features of the technology are real-time, 3D and spatial, based on these characteristics to achieve immersive content. From the perspective of operation and ecology, we believe that the realization of truly open data, assets, and platform docking based on Web3 is a direction that needs to be explored for a longer time, and it is also the missing part of all metaverse concept products today.
Almost every cycle and every hot spot of Internet business has experienced the process from concept to bubble, from bubble to cooling off period, and then to accumulation and rising period. Meta-universe will not be an exception, because the Internet is a completely open technology-driven environment, only if the degree of attention is highly concentrated, there will be a large number of investment in the market, through capital + technology, drive innovative enterprises in the subdivision field to quickly achieve productization, marketization, and then guide user habits, establish business models, and finally achieve a virtuous cycle of investor withdrawal.
Analogy with the game industry, a small cycle of 5 years, a large cycle of 10 years, developers are endless, the industry is constantly evolving, and users finally get relaxation and pleasure in the continuous improvement of experience and content quality, which is the path of continuous change and iteration in the game industry.
Today's Cocos has been compared in 3D development tools, rendering capabilities, and scene construction with Unity and Unreal in the United States. Facing the next generation of the Internet, if there is no actual scene and application, it is difficult to really challenge the industry giants on its own, fortunately, today, not only in the field of games, Cocos has made a lot of progress across fields.
36Kr: How do you see the systemic opportunities presented by the next generation of the Internet?
Chen Haozhi: Internet products only have vitality through continuous iteration, of course, user habits are not formed in a day. We think that the generation born in the next 5-10 years, after the millennium, is likely to be like the state in Ready Player One, living, socializing, and working in a virtual world, so the meaning of digital assets is even higher than that of physical objects in the physical world. The craze for NFTs has unveiled the corner of the curtain, but the core of the scenarios and states that really realize large-scale commercial landing is the migration of hardware platforms, that is, the migration from mobile phones to XR devices (including VR, AR, and MR). Before 2030, the use of mobile phone screens will gradually be diverted and replaced by glasses, and the time spent after 00 and 10 in the virtual world or the mixed real world will also be close to, or even exceed, their real world life time, which is the performance of the metaverse entering the mature stage.
All of this requires massive content, characters, scenes, development tools, and a lot of AI auto-scene filling. How to balance efficiency and effect, for the game engines of the past, it is bound to face more huge challenges in the future. If you consider that the metaverse will gradually evolve from cartoons to hyperfigured worlds, it may take longer to truly reach everyone.
For Cocos, both excited that the entire Internet software and hardware ecosystem will begin a great upgrade and migration, this is a huge opportunity, and the pressure is that this puts forward very high requirements for today's Cocos in all aspects of capabilities and accumulation.
36 Kr: Where will the business engine be iterative in the future?
Chen Haozhi: If we go back to 2014, we really can't imagine that the commercial engine market will have such a large scale.
For the past 20 years, Unity and Unreal have worked with Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple, NVIDIA, and a number of first-tier content vendors in the U.S. technology and business environment.
In 2013, unity financing valuation of 9 years has been 350 million US dollars, in 2012 Tencent invested in Epic (Unreal Engine's parent company) 330 million US dollars, accounting for 40%, corresponding to Epic's valuation of 825 million US dollars, and at this time Unreal as an independent engine company has existed for 15 years, it can be said that the commercial engine company is still a marginal role in the global capital market. By 2021, Unity, which has only been public for one year, will have a maximum market capitalization of $55 billion and an unlisted Epic financing valued at $30 billion (including Fortnite).
For Cocos, as mentioned earlier, whether from the tooling, rendering capabilities and server-side deployment, on the one hand, we put our own services and capabilities PaaS, which can be more convenient to deploy and iterate, on the other hand, we seek the most advanced partners in various fields to jointly create scenes that meet market demand, which is a spiraling process.
In this spiraling development process, Cocos and Huawei, domestic chip manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, platform manufacturers, and foreign partners including Qualcomm, ARM, BlackBerry, etc. are also entering a new period of rise.