Chukong USA, a division of China’s Chukong Technologies, said it is launching a live operations platform for the Cocos2d-x game engine that is used in a wide array of mobile games.
Chukong is launching SDKBOX v1.3, the latest version of a live operations platform that is used in more than 2,700 live games. As such, the launch provides a meaningful upgrade for a very large ecosystem of mobile-game developers.
Beijing-based Chukong was founded in November 2010, and it has operated four core businesses: mobile-game development, mobile-game publishing (particularly helping Western developers access the Chinese market), developer community support, and engine development. Chukong was the sole maintainer and sponsor of the open-source Cocos engine in its early years, and it formally bought Cocos in October 2013.
SDKBOX is a new framework for managing game data software development kits (SDKs) used for analytics, attribution, user acquisition, social, IAP, mediation, and other live operations services, such as events, offers, community, business intelligence, and more.
Chukong USA started beta testing the SDKBOX service in May of this year and formally added it to the award-winning Cocos2d-x game engine in July. Chukong USA revealed that Cocos2d-x v3 has generated over 300,000 downloads year to date.
Ricardo Quesada, the main author of Cocos2d, said in a statement, “Cocos has always been dedicated to making mobile-game development seamless and efficient. With today’s SDKBOX update, we are further solving the problem of SDK fatigue by pre-certifying game data SDKs for the Cocos development platform and bringing on industry-leading live-services partners.”
The new capabilities include installer-based service integration and a ratings and reviews plugin. Chukong’s partners’ games are spread across all geographic regions, including China, the U.S., Ukraine, India, Russia, and Turkey.
Rivals for Cocos2d include Unity Technologies and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
Kai Zhao, the general manager of Chukong USA, said in a statement, “If you look at the mobile-game engine market today, it’s really a two-horse race between Cocos2d-x and Unity. While Cocos2d-x is larger in China, Unity is larger in the U.S., and we split Korea, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.
“Unity has made some smart choices with their first-party live services, but SDKBOX is a truly democratic system because developers can choose from a list of pre-certified services for analytics, user acquisition, mediation, and more. To succeed in mobile today, you have to be able to choose from the best live operations service partners, not just from the ones pre-selected by your engine maker.”
Chukong’s new partners include Fyber, Bee7, PlayPhone, ValuePotion, Soomla Grow, and Scientific Revenue.
Cocos2d-x is the world’s largest open source mobile-game engine, with 490,000 registered mobile-game developers and over 50,000 published titles, Chukong said. Chukong’s investors include Qualcomm, Northern Light Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital, Steamboat Ventures, GGV Capital, Creaturk, and New Horizon Capital. It has raised $83.2 million to date.
