Chapter 6. StarsWar and the Search for Entertainment in Esports Events

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 六 StarsWar的电竞赛事娱乐化探索

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 20, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19619190

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

StarsWar, in full the StarsWar Esports Gala, was originally called the StarsWar International Esports Star Invitational.

A short aside first. I have been turning this history over in my mind on and off for several years, and at the risk of being laughed at, my original plan was to write it anonymously, because a great deal of it is awkward to say out loud. The sensitive questions around CEG in the previous chapter are one example. Here is another: as a member of the StarsWar team, how am I supposed to write about these eight years of StarsWar?

Singing its praises would be easy. I could simply publish the slide deck we used to pitch sponsors, full of pictures and tempting numbers. In reality StarsWar made far too many mistakes as it grew and walked into far too many walls. Some of those mistakes were other people's, and some were our own.

Since this is a series about where esports is heading, and since I have already decided to put my name to it and play the villain, I will start by turning the knife on myself.

Zhou Hao, known as Zax, founder of StarsWar and founder of Replays.net.

Zax is a pivotal figure in the history behind Chinese esports, particularly from the Warcraft III era in 2003 to the present day. His force of character and his ability to rally people have shaped a great deal of what has happened in the scene, so I need to introduce him first, or some of what follows will be hard to understand.

Zax is a quiet, reserved man, both inside esports and outside it. I have known him for almost nine years, and to me he is something like the Tang Monk from Journey to the West. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that he talks too much. I mean that I admire his tolerance and his calm.

Strangers or people he knew well, whether they were posturing in front of him, speaking rudely to him, taking advantage of him, asking him for favours or offering him advice, he could always take the person and the situation in his stride. When someone needed something from him, he usually trusted them and did what he could to help, even when he knew perfectly well that nothing would come back.

That is not easy to do. The old saying that taking a loss is its own kind of gain is simple enough to understand, but how many people are willing to take the loss first? And not just once or twice.

Zax could take a loss, and he could also make room for people. In A World Without Thieves, Uncle Li says that only a man who can make room for his brothers can be the big brother. That is another thing that is easy to say and hard to do, especially for our generation of only children.

Our generation of only children grew up with nothing but family around us. Our relatives accommodated the way we spoke and behaved, and apart from school we had little friction with people our own age. The result was that once we left our parents for school and for society, where nobody had any reason to accommodate us, we did not fit.

Only children are not bad people. It is just that everyone has a few edges and spines. Are there people who are independent-minded and capable and still have no edges or spines? Yes, but very few. Zax is one of them. He could accommodate all sorts of strange tempers, let people try all sorts of odd ideas, and he rarely rejected an idea from his own staff, even when some of those ideas carried considerable risk.

For example, when we were planning StarsWar 7 last year, I said I wanted to host it and try an American-style talk show opening. Never mind whether anyone in Chinese esports had ever pulled that off. I had always been a director working behind the scenes and had never once stepped in front of the audience. He supported me from beginning to end.

That is how Zax managed the small miracle of holding a group of neurotics and obsessives together without any of us cutting him. My own view is that anyone born with that gift is destined to end up at the centre of things.

Mencius said that the right timing matters less than the right ground, that the right ground matters less than people in harmony, and that whoever follows the right path finds many to help him. Because Zax drew people together the way he did, friends of every kind kept arriving and more and more problems got solved, and those lines from Mencius proved themselves at StarsWar more than once when it was in trouble.

Right. Back to the point, and on to StarsWar.

The story starts in 2002. On July 22 that year, Zax wanted a better domain name for the StarCraft replay site he ran, the Classic Replay Download Site, so he tried looking up Replays.net to see whether anyone had taken it. To his astonishment the domain was free, and that is how Zax became the founder of Replays.net.

In 2003 and 2004 the rise of Warcraft III turned Replays.net, which had shifted to Warcraft III and was posting replays regularly, into a busy site. Add Zax's temperament to that, and a large crowd of Warcraft III match report and news enthusiasts quickly gathered on the RN forum. It was there that he got to know Xu Yunbo, at that point nothing more than a Chinese student in the United States delivering takeaway food on a bicycle. Nobody could have guessed that a year later this was the man who would become the boss of IGE, the company that sponsored WE and bought Replays.net and GamesTV.

Xu Yunbo, a Shanghai native, had just finished a master's degree in the United States in 2004 and was living an easy life, playing Warcraft III and delivering food every day. That was also the period when Lineage II's American servers and Blizzard's World of Warcraft were taking off. While everyone else was still clearing new dungeons, Xu Yunbo had already spotted the enormous demand for virtual item trading building up on those servers. A few small Chinese studios had only just started moving onto the American servers to make money, and none of them had his access to information in the United States.

So he pulled together university classmates and friends back in China and set up a virtual item trading site, mmoshop.com. The model was simple: buy gold from Chinese studios and sell it to Americans. Virtual items involve no logistics, so costs were low and efficiency was high, and it was very profitable. Somebody in the United States was already doing it, though, and doing it on a large scale, the American company IGE, Internet Gaming Entertainment.

Xu Yunbo was not intimidated, because he knew his team were all Chinese, which gave them an advantage, and he could buy gold more cheaply than IGE could. From May 2004 onwards mmoshop.com's sales climbed steeply day after day, and in under three months mmoshop.com had taken more than half of IGE's American market.

IGE's founder was Brock Pierce, a former Hollywood child actor. In the autumn of 2004, Xu Yunbo, then 27, sat down with the 24-year-old Brock to discuss a merger. The outcome was that IGE bought mmoshop.com and in 2005 sent Xu Yunbo back to Shanghai as general manager of IGE's China representative office, where he could play to his strengths and take charge of purchasing virtual items.

At that point Zax was still working at The9. Xu Yunbo pressed him hard to join his company and laid out a plan to build an international esports superteam. So Zax brought Replays.net into IGE, and he also talked round KinG, his long-standing partner. KinG brought the YolinY team, which had Sky and suhO on it, to Shanghai, and that was how the WE club was founded.

IGE made all of this happen partly out of Xu Yunbo's own love of esports and partly because there was no suitable way to promote virtual item trading in China at the time. Rather than spend a fortune on advertising, it made more sense to start with esports news sites, which would also give the company a degree of influence and could change the image of virtual item trading. That was also why IGE later bought GamesTV, the predecessor of today's GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group. That is a story for later, so I will leave it here.

Once IGE had brought esports under one roof, Zax set about a promotional plan built on an iron triangle of team, website and tournament. The team was WE, the website was Replays.net, and the tournament was StarsWar.

There was not much deep thinking behind the original idea for StarsWar. WE had just signed the best Warcraft III players in China and South Korea, giving it a star-studded international roster of more than ten players.

The first StarsWar, on June 19, 2005, was really a coming-out party for WE. It was held at the Luwan Stadium in Shanghai and used a King of Fighters format: one-on-one Warcraft III duels in which the loser dropped out, the winner stayed on, and the more you won the more prize money you accumulated. The planning was simple and so was the stage design, just a platform with two desks on it carrying the Replays.net logo. The promotion, by contrast, was generous. We advertised on many forums and on the Haofang platform, and all 2,500 seats at the Luwan Stadium were filled.

Because the King of Fighters format had not been thought through properly, and because we also ran into trouble with the competition machines, the first StarsWar started at three in the afternoon and still had not finished by midnight. What was remarkable was that more than 300 people were still there, waiting in the stands for the end so that they could get autographs from the players. That heartening scene left a deep impression on everyone at IGE, from top to bottom, and not long after the first StarsWar ended, plans for a second were on the table.

After discussion among the bosses, the second StarsWar was provisionally set for October 2005 on a larger scale, with more international esports stars, at the Shanghai Changning International Gymnastics Centre, a 4,000-person venue. That put us under enormous pressure, because whatever we did, everything came back to one question: who was going to pay for the event? IGE had plenty of money then, but the boss had never said he would cover all of it, and there were only a few of us working on StarsWar. I was writing the sponsorship proposal and the operational plan at the same time, dealing with the venue and handling the discussions about networking and on-site construction. Zax was busy inviting the stars, arranging the qualifiers and the schedule, and fighting the company for budget. Colleagues at the website were busy with publicity.

In that period something unexpected happened every day, and every day was spent running around putting out fires. Looking back, there were a few reasons for it.

1. We had no experience, and we could not afford to hire a professional event company.

Nobody in China had staged an esports event for a 4,000-person venue before. WCG's world finals were held in stadiums, but only the floor was used and the stands were closed off. Frankly, we had no idea that running an event in a 4,000-person venue would be so much more complicated than what we had done before. The upgrades to security alone, and the upgrades to the official approvals, took several layers of skin off us. Then again, if we had known from the start how hard it would be, we might have shrunk from it. Luckily we did not know, so we gritted our teeth and held on, and by holding on we got through.

1. Poor management.

A few of us were working ourselves to death under huge pressure, and it felt like an achievement at the time. Looking back, doing everything personally was the wrong approach. We did not understand management and coordination and would not delegate, so in the end no team was built and the project could not grow. Replays.net already had nearly ten people, IGE's marketing department had plenty more, and there were the GamesTV staff as well. Even setting aside the technical and production people, there were more than enough marketing and media people to draw on. If I were doing it the way I would now, I would have talked to the company about forming a project group, brought in its best people and divided the work by speciality. The results would have been better, we would have been less exhausted, and there would have been no bottleneck leaving other people unable to help even when they wanted to.

I have covered those two points in a few sentences here, but at the time they tormented us for the better part of a year.

On the sponsorship side, several of the deals we discussed started with great enthusiasm and then went quiet for one reason or another. That had something to do with the state of esports then. Sky was not yet a two-time WCG champion, esports was nowhere near as widely recognised in China as it is now, and Chinese players only watched Korean, European and American stars. To borrow the language of a labourer on a landlord's estate in the old society, what stood in front of us then was rather more than three great mountains.

So the second StarsWar, originally planned for October 2005, kept being postponed. Waiting for word from one big sponsor dragged us all the way to Christmas, and in the end we talked it over and decided we could not wait any longer. The project had to be finished before Chinese New Year.

As it happened, the Shanghai company T2CN was planning the national finals of FreeStyle, the street basketball game, and they approached GamesTV about a broadcast partnership. Yaomo of GamesTV, who is Zhang Zhexi, now deputy general manager of the GamesTV channel, called Zax and me in for a meeting. As soon as the T2CN people described their timing and their requirements, we realised that they matched StarsWar exactly. After working through the details, the two sides decided to run the events together. We had the attention, they had the budget.

And so the second StarsWar was set for the seventh day before Chinese New Year in 2006. There was a month and a half to go, and all the preparations had to start moving again.

Just as ticket sales and publicity were in full swing, we suddenly learned that the venue considered StarsWar to involve a great many foreign participants, and therefore required approval from the Chinese foreign affairs authorities or from a national-level government body, since otherwise the police would not take responsibility for it.

There were three weeks to go before the event and more than half the tickets had already gone out. Zax and I were stunned.

StarsWar 2 had an extremely strong star lineup. Many of the players were coming to China for the first time and some of them had never even met one another. Tickets were being snapped up everywhere, and distributing them through eleven internet café chains in Shanghai worked very well.

The timing was also very good. Before Chinese New Year there was no other entertainment at all, no games exhibitions, no traditional sports events, no concerts, and students were on their winter holidays. We were the only ones running anything in that window, so we drew a lot of attention.

The location of the Shanghai Changning International Gymnastics Centre was good too, as everyone knows. It was not far from the metro and a short taxi ride away.

But even with the timing, the ground and the people all in our favour, without that approval the venue would cancel the event. They did not want to cancel the contract, but they wanted trouble even less, which we could understand, although it left us thoroughly depressed.

A short discussion told us the foreign affairs route was hopeless. Those departments had nothing whatever to do with esports and we would not even know who to explain it to. That left the sports authorities, but even the fastest procedure required an application three months in advance. What we were facing was very close to a dead end, so a frantic hunt for anyone with connections began. Shanghai Sports Bureau, Beijing Sports Bureau, the General Administration of Sport, we contacted everyone we knew, and we even went to cultural authorities we were not familiar with, which nearly made the whole thing more complicated.

Fortunately Zax knew a lot of people, and we found 5V. I want to thank 5V again here. He was working at the sports administration at the time, and he is the Warcraft III player who was the first in Asia to earn the Human archmage avatar. To speed the process up he went through the approval procedure for us in person, standing outside senior officials' offices every day, waiting for them, explaining what this thing was and trying to get a signature. Even with that extraordinary effort, the approval only reached the final stage of an official's seal a week before the event, and then another bolt from the blue arrived. The official was away on a business trip and would not be back until the following month.

Those days felt like years. None of us could sleep at night. We lay there staring at the ceiling, because more than ten thousand tickets for the two days of competition had gone out and sold out completely. Every day at the office we sat watching our phones for news from Beijing. The preparations were more or less finished and we had no appetite for details. What we agonised over every day was whether to put out an announcement postponing the event. Every day we debated whether to go ahead or not, whether to apologise or not, because large numbers of players were travelling in from other cities. They had bought train tickets in advance, booked hotels and arranged to meet friends, so a postponement would cost not only everybody's money but our entire reputation.

Zax showed extraordinary composure through all of it. He talked to us as though nothing was wrong, never impatient, never angry. That was when the American series Prison Break was popular, and he recommended we watch it, saying that we were living in that show, where every episode solves one big problem and then throws up another, but in the end everything gets solved.

Just as we were all close to breaking, on the morning of the third day before StarsWar 2, we received the sealed document faxed through from the sports administration in Beijing. I still remember the feeling of every muscle in my body letting go as Zax handed me the fax. The swing in emotion was so extreme that nothing similar has made me particularly nervous since.

The second StarsWar was held at the Shanghai Changning International Gymnastics Centre on January 21 and 22, 2006. Over the two days more than ten thousand spectators came through the venue and the live stream drew 250,000 unique IP addresses, with an estimated three million people watching at the same time. It set a record for the largest live audience in China and started a new wave of online broadcasts of star invitational events.

StarsWar 2 played to a full house. It was one of the finest moments of my life, and I am sure it is one of the best memories many of the people in the arena and online have too. Looking back now, there was a great deal we did badly. The stage was crude, the machines broke down at the end of the first match and took more than half an hour to fix, GamesTV had nothing resembling a proper production desk for the broadcast, only a switcher the size of a briefcase, and we even forgot to install lighting over the casters' desk. In our memories, though, that year was perfect.

After StarsWar 2 we celebrated in a VIP room at the Babyface club. We drank against the Europeans, and to our surprise a lot of people in the club recognised the players and kept sending drinks over, so a great many of us woke up the next morning with splitting headaches. Everyone was still delighted. Writing this makes me genuinely happy. I miss the relief of that year, and the madness of it.

Moving the third StarsWar to Xi'an was my suggestion, and it was the wrong one. I thought at the time that StarsWar's future lay in touring the country, and that if we always stayed in Shanghai people would lose interest. That reasoning still looks correct now, but we had very little operational experience, the problems of working in an unfamiliar city multiplied several times over, management costs rose sharply, and the result was mediocre. So the fourth edition came back to Shanghai and was run together with ChinaJoy. After that, with the financial crisis of 2008, sponsors cutting their spending and IGE's American company running into trouble, our group broke up. Zax went to work at Razer's Singapore headquarters, WE went into a partnership with Pepsi, and IGE sold Replays.net to the Beijing company Maidong, the parent company of Ehome.

StarsWar only started up again when Zax came back from Singapore in 2010. I will write about what happened after that in the next part of this history. For now, let us take stock of StarsWar.

Before StarsWar in 2005, almost every Chinese tournament followed a cup format like WCG's, running from grassroots qualifiers up to a final champion. That model had been around since 1998, and after many years it had lost all its vitality, because the arrival of professional esports teams meant the regional qualifiers held no suspense any more. Ordinary players could hardly break through, and as the gap between professional and amateur standards widened, fewer and fewer people entered the regional qualifiers, so interest in the events fell away as well.

Put simply, esports had reached a new stage. The stars had arrived, and enthusiasts increasingly preferred to be spectators rather than compete themselves. StarsWar successfully seized that moment, and made its name on it.

Afterwards a lot of tournaments began to realise that audiences wanted star exhibition matches, and started to change direction or merge with others. Objectively speaking, though, by then the timing, the ground and the people had all passed. From 2007 the ageing of Counter-Strike and Warcraft III was already severe, Dota had not yet risen, the established esports stars were still the same handful of people, there were more and more events, and audiences were increasingly tired of seeing them. Watching an event in the arena also takes far too long. It is not like a film or a concert, which is over in three hours at most. Add the maturing of live streaming technology, and watching from home had become a habit.

So the question of how to attract audiences into the arena became our new problem.

Let me say a little about what StarsWar has explored and believed since 2010. The StarsWar that was reborn in 2010 chose to stick with professional, high-level star exhibition matches while moving cautiously towards entertainment. In 2012 we successfully added the StarsWar Esports Academy Awards ceremony, the American-style talk show opening, stars singing and so on.

StarsWar's philosophy is to lower the barrier to esports and move towards entertainment. We found that a large proportion of the audience coming to the venue were secondary esports enthusiasts, friends or relatives of enthusiasts, who came in something closer to the spirit of a gathering or a day out. Core players are, after all, a minority. Holding them with high-level competition matters, but so does looking after their friends. Making players feel that the venue is enjoyable and fun, that there is something to do and no reason to be bored, that they can meet stars and get autographs as well as watch high-level matches, is work that looks simple and takes a great deal of thought to do properly.

At this stage a tournament is still a product that does not make money, or rather a very unstable product. The uncertainty of sponsorship means it cannot be the main source of revenue for events in future. Whether events will eventually sustain themselves by raising ticket prices, by combining sponsorship with ticket sales, or through some other model, I cannot say for certain. Esports is still finding its way, and I hope everyone will explore and experiment together.

Of the three forms of Chinese esports events, I have now covered the cup format and the star exhibition format. That leaves the league format, which will go in the next chapter, together with the structure of China's games video media.