I have question that is Cocos Creator Open Source or Free or both?
If it’s Free then for how long it will be free or maybe in future certain parts maybe locked as premium or certain revenue must be shared with Cocos for the game build in cocos engine/editor.
2nd question is that how the team earns which supports the Cocos Creator/Engine ?
Is it investor backed game engine? or the team earns from priority support only or other means…
These are very important questions to be answered before any one invest years of hard-work on this engine.
Cocos Creator is free. Though the editor is not open-source, the engine is 100% open source. You can check out the GitHub to add your own requests to the engine and see how it works. You can also edit it to your needs and export using the custom engine option and selecting your newly edited version.
So the next question is, are we locking or making items premium? No. We do have VIP support for teams building games with Cocos Creator that you can get. It allows for direct conversations with our developers and helps in any issue you have or if you have special needs for the engine. This is one of the ways we make money from the engine.
We make money from the engine from a few sources:
VIP support
Purchases from the Cocos Store
Special collaborations with larger companies for support of Cocos products or services
HMI creation
Other sources
So don’t worry. Our main focus is on the developer. We want to give you both stability and tools that will help you. Just build your game and export it. Don’t worry about paying us anything for it.
I can’t say anything or any business strategy could sustain forever, but one thing for sure is that we can’t implant anything into the open source runtime that you have full control of. Anything like install fees won’t happen in cocos, because we don’t collect any end user data.
You have full control on the build package of your game, including your logic, resources, sdks, engine runtime.
We do currently still relying on investors, not yet profitable, but we will try our best to make it profitable. For that, we really need your support as developers, ecosystem is the main trigger. Tbh, Unity have an extremely strong ecosystem, if not for the eternal growth they are pursuing, and the non-stop growing R&D expense, they could have a very healthy business. We have learnt from their mistake and we hope we will stick our path with healthy business model.
Thanks to be transparent and explaining in detail. That’s right at the end a product needs to be profitable to support the vision in a long run but the point is to do it in a healthy way is an innovation on it’s own… Unity just Shackled the whole industry with it’s new pricing policies that’s what triggered me to ask this since I’m using cocos creator for a long time.
I see that Cocos has evolved a lot since I last used Cocos2D-x. Back then I didn’t even think about 3D, but now in 10 minutes I assembled a scene with materials and shaders no worse than in Unity. I’m very glad that you guys are developing the engine. I’m glad it’s still open and free. And yes, I really want it to stay that way. I would like to have the opportunity to support you in the event of a successful project.
You need to build more for the Cocos Asset Store to kick start the ecosystem. It is very lacking. It is one of the features that people ask the most out of Godot Engine.
