"SUD" Acquires "COCOS" for $510 Million, Game Engine Giant Ushered in Transformation | First Report by 36Kr

Text | Liu Shiwu

36Kr Games has learned that the in-app game distribution platform "SUD" has recently completed a full acquisition of the well-known game engine company "COCOS" for 510 million RMB. The two parties will conduct in-depth integration at the levels of traffic, ecosystem, technology, and team.

SUD is an enterprise that deployed GI (Gamification Interactive) early in the industry. It has now grown into a leading in-app game distribution platform and is serving over 2,000 leading traffic platforms globally, including many super apps.

COCOS is a leading lightweight and general-purpose game engine with more than a decade of technology and developer ecosystem accumulation. It has a complete workflow including an IDE and over 1.7 million global game developers, leading in the lightweight game segment.

Business segments of SUD and COCOS

Looking at the global engine market, Unreal Engine is mainly used in large-scale 3A games, Unity mainly covers mobile games, and COCOS mainly covers a large number of lightweight mini-games. The overlap among the three engine tracks is low, and each leads in its own track.

This acquisition by SUD will have the opportunity to activate COCOS' years of accumulation: SUD has established a mature traffic acquisition and monetization channel in the global market through its "SUD GI Cloud" global game distribution platform and "SUD GI AD" interactive advertising business, while Cocos can provide its engine technology and developer ecosystem accumulated over more than a decade.

The COCOS developer ecosystem will be fully integrated into SUD's global traffic system. At the same time, the SUD OpenPaaS platform will deeply integrate the COCOS engine and toolchain, strengthen its position as the entry point for opening games in apps, and improve the compatibility of in-app games, promoting and deepening COCOS' absolute leading position in in-app embedded game engines.

It is worth noting that the COCOS engine itself will also undergo a major strategic adjustment. The upcoming COCOS 4 version will return to the pure open-source model of "global, permanent, and free", including all the core engine code and the never-before-opened CLI toolchain code. Against the backdrop of some commercial engines gradually tightening their licenses, COCOS' reverse opening is expected to attract more medium and large R & D teams that value controllability and customization.

In addition, SUD has simultaneously launched a new generation of developer tool PinK, fully transforming to AI Coding and integrating multiple types of AI Native Kits, Agents, and MCP plugins. From this perspective, the goal of the tool is to lower the creation threshold and deeply embed AI as the "main driver" into the development process to cope with the trend of high-frequency and lightweight development of game content.

From an industry perspective, this acquisition reflects that the functional innovation of a single engine has evolved into a competition of comprehensive strength in "global traffic + open-source engine + developer ecosystem + AI toolchain". At present, when large companies are reducing costs and increasing efficiency and small and medium teams have a strong need to survive, a win - win solution with transparency, open source, and full - link support is getting new opportunities.

This article was first published on “36Kr Games”.