Why Wall Street thinks the value of a touch-tech game engine is zero

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On the evening of May 21, Chenhao, the chief executive of Touch Technology, said that the company's valuation was only 540 million dollars below expectations. The gaming engine of the touch-tech IPO push is estimated at 0 on Wall Street, according to a Wall Street algorithm for the valuation of touch technology disclosed in the mail.

In fact, the game industry has already foreseen that Wall Street will not recognize the game engine value of touch technology, touch technology Cocos2d-x game engine can occupy a certain market share because it is a relatively lightweight engine, while the unity of the advanced charging function of the engine to take a free strategy, But this led to the cocos2d-x of open source and its commercial value formed a paradox, has invested heavily in the cocos2d-x to touch technology is more like a chicken, the tasteless and unwilling to abandon.

According to Shen Yu, a founder of the shooter Network, who is a pioneer in the open source project, Cocos2d-x and similar open-source projects will have one of the biggest problems in the commercialization of development: LICENSE. This leads to the phenomenon that open source projects have only the dominant and no real owners.

Shen Yu that Cocos2d-x is an open Source engine for the MIT protocol, as well as a number of standardized open source licensing agreements-"The authorized person has the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, redistribute, authorize and/or sell copies of software and software, and to grant equal rights to the supplier, Subject to the following obligations: All copies of the software and software must include the above copyright notice and this license statement. "Translation into the vernacular is: no one can say that they have the full control of the Cocos2d-x code." To be clear, even touch has cocos2d-x trademarks, domain names, and even a specific version of copyright. However, under the authorization agreement, touch cannot restrict anyone from using, copying, modifying, merging, publishing, distributing, authorizing or even selling cocos2d-x code. Even if the market share is high, touch can not rely on the engine to collect money.

"Because even if you do not, even closed, a copy of the project will continue to spread without restrictions." Even if the launch of a cocos2d-y tomorrow, or BAT release a cocos2d-z, even if the code is a complete clone, can be LICENSE allowed, touch completely can not stop. The reason that this has not happened is that touch is the only one in the flower market that nobody else is willing to spend, investing in open Source engine development, which is hard to see directly return business. People can't afford it, or think it's not worth it, Shen Yu.

There are also no successful Open-source engine listings in the history of the game engine, such as the Ogre3d, the most well-known Open-source engine in the Open-source engine industry. But the Ogre3d engine itself is not profitable, but on the basis of Ogre3d on its own development of the swim, Kirin nets and other gaming companies have achieved greater commercial interests, resulting in the Orge3d engine itself did not have too much input, into a stagnant state. The end is not open source business engine unreal and so on. This is also a common end of the open Source engine.

It can be seen that Wall Street investors are very knowledgeable, touch may tell a wrong story, with Chinese thinking to make up an American story, but the United States is the birthplace of Open-source software, Wall Street than we know what is open source software.

Know another registered user to talk about Yi also believes that touch-controlled technology cocos2d-x Open source is its dead hole.

In fact, there are big players involved in every aspect of the engine commercialization. March 2014, Tencent's largest gaming engine company epic, opened all C + + source code, only 19 dollars a month to get all the services of the Unreal 4 engine, which is much lower than the cocos2d-x minimum of 39000 yuan per year support costs are far less, Equivalent to 3.6% of the cocos2d-x cost. Crytek2014, a well-known game engine company, offers a monthly $9.9 CryEngine authorization, which is equivalent to less than 1.9% of the cocos2d-x cost.

The game engine is open source without direct commercial value, from the operational point of view through the open source game engine to pry open platform import business value is not likely. Industry veteran analysis that Cocos2d-x game engine is open source, which means that the engine itself because of open source is free, CP through the Cocos2d-x development game, no need to know touch, touch is not necessarily able to get the agent, open Source engine can not really grasp the CP; At the same time because competitors also directly control the source code, Cocos2d-x game engine can not be a touch-control technology to face the competitor's chips. At the same time, because the Cocos2d-x game engine is open source, now many game companies will add a lot of new features, so that there will be a lot of branch versions, as version fragmentation becomes more and more serious, the role of cocos2d-x itself will be weakened, it is difficult to form the mobile entertainment platform of touch technology.

From a trend perspective, game moves are shifting from 2D to 3D. Although cocos2d-x in the 2d market share is larger, but 3d is completely unity of the world. Data displayed as the network CTO, former long tour technical director Zhaoyan in the knowledge that, "if one day the market 3D products more and more, I think cocos3d even out of the odds, although the 2d products will exist for a long time, although not all types of games need to use 3d performance, But looking at the PC and console game history, 3d is an inevitable trend. In short, cocos is a fashionable tool, it greatly reduced the threshold of small team entrepreneurship, now in the 2d market heyday, but the shelf life is hard to say. ”

One can be corroborated by the fact that the current unity of the code is 2 million lines, and cocos2d-x only 200,000 lines, the gap is evident.

The complexity of the 3D engine is far beyond the 2D engine, an imperfect but useful 3D engine has a minimum development cycle of more than 4 years, and developers who know the bottom of the 3D engine are extremely rare in China, and the 3D engine development requires a high level of tactics. From the domestic and foreign mature 3D game engine development cycle, see: Unity3d Engine 2005 released, to 2009 only stable available, Unreal Unreal Engine 1999 that has been released, the domestic tour takes 4 years to develop the Genesis-3d engine, currently in the mobile end is also in the testing phase, No commercial games have yet been developed. And the strength is far weaker than the company's touch, only last year to start the 3D engine development, there is no commercial game release, so in the short term should not see the commercial benefits of COCOS3D.

Compared with the Cocos2d-x game engine, where the business value is not seen, its research and development investment is huge. At present, there are two years of cocos2d-x programming experience of engineers monthly salary tens of thousands of is very common, even if cocos2d-x engine engineers in 100-bit calculation, the annual research and development input may be as high as 40 million or 50 million, which is equivalent to the touch technology 2013 88.3 million of the loss to expand about 50%, will bring a heavy burden to the listed companies.