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Alibaba subsidiary Lingxi Games shuts down game engine project as e-commerce giant sharpens focus on core businesses
- Lingxi Games has discontinued its Ant Engine project, as parent Alibaba pares down investment in its non-core businesses
- That move comes after TikTok owner ByteDance and Kuaishou recently scaled back their own video gaming operations
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Ann Caoin Shanghai
Alibaba Group Holding has discontinued the game engine project at its video gaming subsidiary, prompting the departure of another founding member of the unit, as the e-commerce giant pares down investment in its non-core businesses.
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That development was revealed by Wu Yunyang, a co-founder of Lingxi Games who was responsible for the Alibaba subsidiary’s Ant Engine project, in his personal blog post earlier this week. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Wu, who wrote that he had left the unit on Monday, said his departure was because he felt that the company “no longer wants to develop its own game client engine, [or] does not agree with my development plan for the Ant Engine”.
A game engine is a software development framework, also known as a game architecture, that provides settings and configurations to optimise and simplify how video games are created on a variety of programming languages. Examples of game engines include Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, Unity from Unity Technologies and Cocos from Chinese firm Cocos Technologies.
“Perhaps Alibaba’s gaming unit has more urgent things to do now, and thus cannot wait for the benefits [Ant Engine] would bring in three to five years,” Wu said.
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Alibaba did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Wednesday.
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