Chapter 7. GamesTV, Past Lives and Present

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 七 游戏风云的前世今生

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 22, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19620732

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.

In 2006, once the third StarsWar was over, I formally transferred to the GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group Interactive, which at that point still carried the joint name GamesTV (an independently run company, GamesTV Ltd, has since been set up). The first project I touched there was the preparation of the first G League.

While I was sorting out the material for a slide deck, I noticed that G League still had no Chinese name. So I drafted one, the China Esports Television League, and took it to the management for approval. At the review meeting, Bai Yuhai, head of the channel's editorial office, made a suggestion: the word "China" could only be used by national sports authorities, so we would be better off with "National". Everyone thought that was a good idea, and that was how G League's Chinese name, the National Esports Television League, came to be settled.

The stars turned. Seven years later...

At ten in the morning on March 9, 2013, the grand final of G League's second season was to be held at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai.

This is a venue for 8,000 people, and it is the most sought-after concert venue in Shanghai today. Anyone who has never run a large event may not understand what that means behind the scenes.

Putting G League in the Mercedes-Benz Arena meant, on one hand, that the difficulty of executing every part of it would rise sharply. Going from 4,000 people to 8,000 is not a simple matter of multiplying by two. The complexity grows geometrically. From logistics support and ticketing channels at the small end to project approval and cost control at the large end, everything faced a test we had never met before. The GamesTV team's ability to deliver, and how smoothly its people worked together, would be examined from every angle in this one event. On the other hand, it meant that esports was becoming more commercial. High venue costs, advertising in the metro and outdoors: all of that is a way of speaking to people outside esports. Esports could now stage a show in a venue like this, and that was a leap in kind.

Whatever the outcome, as a former member of GamesTV I am proud of what this team has held on to and explored over the years, and I dedicate this piece to all the television people who have contributed to the development of games video programming in China.

A bond with games that was meant to be

In 2004, Wu Qiang, who loved FPS games and later became GamesTV's general manager; Zhang Zhexi, who loved football games and is now deputy general manager of GamesTV; Zhang Rui, who loved console games and is now a producer at GamesTV; and Wen Shengke, who had already left the games industry, together with others, founded GamesTV in a coffee shop.

Do you remember the previous chapter on StarsWar, where I mentioned that Xu Yunbo, IGE's general manager in China, was sent back to China in 2005 to build the Shanghai representative office? IGE's head office in the United States had bought a number of games media companies there in order to gain a voice and change its image as a virtual item trader, and it had worked well, so the company planned to repeat that route in China.

As it happened, Wen Shengke was a former classmate of Xu Yunbo's, and that made the connection. Call it fate. You have to believe in it.

So in early summer 2005 IGE bought GamesTV, and GamesTV was the forerunner of today's GamesTV channel. Its original idea was fairly simple: make video programmes about games, then see whether there was any chance of selling advertising. It started with esports because Counter-Strike was still hot at the time and Warcraft III was just getting going. Compared with the online games of the day, esports was an entry point with a clearer target.

Around June 2005, IGE moved into an office in the Wenxin Newspaper Group building on Weihai Road, and GamesTV and the Replays.net project group I belonged to moved in after it. The two groups sat less than ten metres apart in a straight line. That was when I got to know Yaomo, who is Zhang Zhexi, along with Wu Qiang, Wen Shengke and the others, and we all began life as colleagues.

Because GamesTV intended to start from esports, the first priority was finding esports people who could both cast and appear on camera.

At first Zax, the founder of Replays.net, was the on-camera caster, making Warcraft III tutorial videos specifically. But Zax already had RN and StarsWar to run and could not be in two places at once, so a more suitable person had to be found.

That was how BBC, introduced by Yaomo, joined GamesTV. He picked the work up quickly, and from then on his life has been bound up with the casting desk. The professional player MagicYang was brought in around the same time, and the classic golden pairing of BBC and Lao Yang started to take shape then as well.

GamesTV's equipment was extremely simple at the start. The studio was built inside an empty room of less than ten square metres in the office, the umbrella lights were welded together by someone the staff found themselves, and most of the cameras were consumer models.

Even so, things moved fast in that period, and a whole group of formidable people joined in a very short time.

Zhang Chuqi, an old boy not yet 40 whom we usually called Lao Zhang out of respect, was a former special forces paratrooper, a big, imposing Wuhan man with a face as red as the warrior Guan Gong's in the operas. After demobilisation he spent more than ten years grinding away inside television stations, and he had all the habits of the classic old television hand: a fierce temper and superb technique. Every one of us has been shouted at by him. BBC was even reduced to tears when he first started presenting. Yet nobody resented it.

Lao Zhang directed the broadcast for the second through fourth editions of StarsWar while I was the on-site director, and I took my share of the shouting there too. At first I could hardly bear it. Later I realised that he only ever went after the problem, never the person, and that once a job was done he would pick up his tea mug and grin like a child. With him around, every one of us had to work at full attention. He was like a whip, and I am glad the team had someone like that then.

But Lao Zhang was also undone by that temper. Once his blood was up he would defer to nobody, not to bosses and not to guests, and inside a television station that was bound to cause trouble. He left GamesTV in 2006 and now works in publishing. Last year he came to Shanghai and we had dinner together. He is the same character as ever, although he has married and had a son and seems a good deal calmer.

Two other formidable people may be more familiar to television audiences in Shanghai.

In 2002, Shanghai's Lifestyle channel launched a games programme called You Dian Feng Kuang that went on to be very popular, and I am sure many people remember it. It went off the air because of SARFT's 2004 ban on games programmes. After several changes of course, the programme's chief planner Huang Hao and its presenter Zhang Rui joined GamesTV in 2006.

We called Huang Hao Huang Laoda, Big Brother Huang, out of respect. He was a director with a big beard and no shortage of character, a producer with very clear thinking and a great deal of television production experience. In 2006, at an event, he watched me rushing about and remarked in passing that on site, the director should have nothing to do. That one line opened my eyes about how to lead a team through a project.

Zhang Rui trained in the acting department of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and his delivery is thoroughly professional. He could pick up a script I had only just finished and voice it on the spot, smoothing out any awkward sentences automatically as he went, without a single pause. It often made me marvel at how wide the gap between one trade and another can be. He is himself devoted to console games such as the Xbox 360, came to them early and knows them deeply, and on consoles he is the absolute authority.

Huang Hao and Zhang Rui brought with them not only a good many television production people, directors and post-production staff among them, but also a television station's methods and standards for making programmes. That lifted GamesTV a step up in both the range and the quality of its output. Alongside esports competitions there were now single-player games programmes and games news programmes.

Xiaorong117, now GamesTV's tournament director, retired from the AS team in 2005, joined Haofang first to run tournaments, and was then brought into GamesTV in 2006. Xiaorong casting FPS matches from a professional player's point of view was a revelation.

Xiaorong is a very clever Shanghainese. In my own observation, people who grow up in big cities tend to be good with others, and Xiaorong fits that well. The other thing about him is that he catches the work the bosses throw down and makes an effort to finish it. That is not easy, because some of that work is extremely dull and still has to be done.

No boss dislikes a subordinate who can take some of the pressure off, which is why, even when GamesTV was split up in 2008, Xiaorong was in the first group named to go over to Shanghai Media Group.

As a fellow Capricorn, I can tell that Xiaorong has spent these years holding things in, and the price has been considerable. When I went to see everyone at GamesTV last month, Xiaorong had far less hair and a much older outlook. It struck me hard. How had the Takuya Kimura of those days turned into the character actor Huang Bo?

Do you remember Sweet Coffee, who made the Counter-Strike MTV series?

Persuaded by Wu Qiang, he too came from Beijing to Shanghai to join GamesTV. His life had been fairly rough, which gave him an unusual capacity for observation from an early age. He looks at the things around us that everyone takes for granted from a very different angle. He returned to Beijing in 2008 and now works at Perfect World.

First signs of strength

GamesTV's first real push was the WCG world finals held in Singapore in November 2005. Before that, Zhang Zhexi had spent a great deal of time and effort talking to the WCG organising committee and eventually secured the broadcast rights for free. If it worked, it would be the first time the great majority of Chinese esports fans could watch pictures from the WCG venue as they happened, so IGE backed it strongly and sent out a GamesTV reporting team. Yaomo and several other colleagues went to Singapore to keep the live broadcast running and to conduct on-camera interviews.

I remember that the video interviews they filmed were too large to send back in time, so to save time they recorded interviews down a telephone line instead. Before one of those calls I happened to be in their office and heard Yaomo's exhausted voice going over the arrangements with Wu Qiang. They had been working for days on end and still could not rest, because WCG only lasts those few days, and I am sure everyone understands how much first-hand information matters.

The hard work paid off handsomely. GamesTV's coverage of WCG was excellent and attention rose sharply, all the more so because that was the year Sky took China's first WCG world championship in Warcraft III, and a world championship that carried real weight. Esports fans all over China were in uproar.

Precisely because the results were so good, there was competition for the broadcast rights the following year, at the WCG world finals in 2006. NeoTV, as it then was, paid US$100,000 and took away rights that would otherwise have gone to GamesTV for nothing, since the WCG organising committee had found working with GamesTV in 2005 a pleasant experience.

That affair also planted the bad blood between NeoTV and GamesTV. It belongs to a later part of the story, so I will not open it up here.

Now for the problems GamesTV had between 2005 and 2006.

Looking back at those two years, apart from the StarsWar 2 broadcast and the WCG 2005 broadcast, which stood out, a great deal was done but there were not many highlights. Why? I think there are several reasons.

1. The company had no clear direction.

That has to start with the senior people at IGE and GamesTV at the time. First an aside: Xu Yunbo and I are on very good terms personally now, and sometimes, when we have had a few drinks, I curse the man he was back then to his face and he does not mind, because we both understand that if I had been in his position then, I might not have known what to do either.

IGE's net profit at that point was US$300,000 a day, and outsiders valued the company at US$600 million. It did not have many people, but it made a great deal of money, and judging by how hot the online games market was around 2006, its prospects were unlimited. So as far as IGE's bosses were concerned, the media businesses beneath them did not need to think about making money. They only had to make good programmes.

But how do you make the programmes better? With no pressure and no direction from above, the people below were naturally left at a loss after a while.

1. There was no fixed broadcast platform and no fixed volume of programming, and ratings were low.

Online game operators were spending enormous sums every year on portals such as 17173, yet very little on video media. Partly this was because the habit of watching video, and the demand for it, were not yet great among players. Partly it was because video platforms were not mature. A video site like Youku only appeared in June 2006, and network conditions were not what they are now, so users could not watch video as easily or as smoothly as they can today.

By 2006 another problem had arrived: the Licence for Disseminating Audiovisual Programmes through Information Networks and the Licence for the Production and Operation of Radio and Television Programmes.

The policies behind those two licences had in fact been issued back in 2004, but the development of the internet in those years was fairly chaotic. Everyone was testing the water and waiting to see, and nobody had made money and stuck their head above the parapet, so although SARFT had issued the policy it had not come down hard.

Still, it was like a sharp sword hanging over our heads. None of us knew when it would fall, and neither did Xu Yunbo, but the pressure on him was greater. He had to think about where GamesTV would go once it had grown, or there was no point in building it at all.

It was at that moment that Xu Yunbo got to know Zhang Yue, a schoolmate from his middle school days who worked at Shanghai Media Group. Zhang Yue made the introductions that led him to Gao Yue, later the general manager of Shanghai Media Group Interactive Television, or SiTV, who has since left the company, and to Zhang Dazhong, now a vice president of SMG.

A word about SiTV here.

SiTV made digital television programming, the kind you need a set-top box to watch, and at the time it had a GamesTV channel under it that needed a large volume of games programming.

On one side, GamesTV had the people, the money and the programmes but was worried about having no licence and no distribution channel. On the other, SiTV had the channel and the model but was short of games programmes, short of specialist people and short of money. A marriage between the GamesTV channel and GamesTV the company was therefore the natural outcome.

Worth mentioning here: the old GamesTV slogan "You wo suo ai, ren wo feng yun", roughly "play what I love, ride the winds as I please", came out of the mouth of Gao Yue, who holds a master's degree in literature, in the middle of a meeting. Which shows that people who make their way up inside a television station are never simple.

The merger was completed quickly, and GamesTV's headcount jumped from a dozen or so people to nearly 50. The old office could no longer hold everyone, so the company moved to the Huanwei Multimedia Valley on Guangzhong Road West, which had professional studios of all sizes. The popular variety programmes of that period, My Hero among them, and various celebrity meet-and-greets were recorded there, and the ground floor of the building was often blocked solid by several hundred frantic fans.

By any measure, GamesTV at that point was sailing before the wind with a clear road ahead.

Now to introduce a key figure.

Chen Jianshu, general manager of the GamesTV business unit at SiTV and founder of G League.

After the merger in June 2006, Chen Jianshu joined GamesTV as Shanghai Media Group's representative. He is now GamesTV's general manager, and we like to call him Jianshu. He is another remarkable figure. A master's graduate from the United Kingdom who loves games, he joined SMG after returning to China and took charge of the GamesTV channel. In the beginning the channel was him alone, finding footage, cutting it and writing the plans, and he kept it going that way for a long time.

Chen Jianshu's background is a sensitive matter and he keeps a very low profile himself, so I will not say much about it. All I can say is that he knows officialdom well and is deeply interested in games. He actually has a strong personality, but he has a gift for knowing when to hold back and when to let go, and for knowing how to survive and grow inside a state-owned enterprise like a television station, which he manages with room to spare. That allowed him to keep a line open to the senior people at SMG while also knowing how to draw in games talent. Judging the right distance in officialdom is very hard. Being the boss is no job for a human being. Faced with conflicting demands from several directions, you need not only the right strategic direction but also the constant ability to smooth things over and work in the grey areas, and those are real skills.

The GamesTV of the years after 2008 won a lot of pioneering opportunities inside a by-the-book television station precisely because it had leaders like Chen Jianshu. He and Yaomo, one handling those above and one handling those below, worked together to a fine art, and GamesTV's successful profits from tournaments and browser games around 2010 owed a great deal to his efforts.

Back to the main thread.

G League formally began operating in January 2007. A national esports television league was something Chinese esports people had wanted for many years, because Korea's digital television station had been making stars through a television league since the StarCraft era in 1999, and doing it with great success. In other words, this was the best esports model we had actually been able to see over the years, and the only one all of us agreed on.

I will not go into detail about how good G League is, because everyone can see it. It runs on time, it is properly organised, it is large in scale, its prize money is high and paid when it should be, and its venues are well known. It has been staged successfully at the Oriental Pearl Tower and on the Nanjing Road pedestrian street more than once, and it has repeatedly joined forces with international esports organisations to put on large events.

Let me talk instead about the problems G League has run into over the years.

1. The profit model of Korean television may not work well in China any time soon.

Korea is not large and has high penetration of broadband and digital television, which means that subscription rates and viewing figures are both relatively high to begin with. High ratings mean advertisers are willing to pay, so as long as the station makes good programmes, the monthly subscription fees and the advertising alone add up to a considerable sum.

China is different. Watching television for free has been the public's habit for so many years that the spread of paid digital set-top boxes is still slow even now. Some large cities can already watch the GamesTV channel for free, but most areas still have to pay before it can be switched on. That has produced an awkward situation in which digital television has stayed popular without ever quite breaking through.

So G League ran into a great deal of trouble finding sponsors in its first three years and was still burning money as late as 2009. The pressure on Yaomo, who was in charge of G League then, was considerable. Later, as penetration improved and the league's name spread, sponsorship kept growing, and by now the model has settled into a healthy cycle.

1. The league format has advantages and disadvantages.

Selection in a league is a fairly long process. The advantage is relatively high brand exposure for the sponsors, and it helps build a viewing habit. But the disadvantage is just as obvious. There are many game titles and many teams competing, which disperses the points of interest.

1. The staff are run off their feet, and it drains them.

I came out of GamesTV and I know the pressure of working at a television station. Back then each person had to deliver a fixed number of programme minutes a week, and these were not programmes you finish by recording a match and casting it. They had to have depth. You chose your own topic, pitched it, gathered material, went out to film, did the interviews, edited it afterwards and submitted it for review, and it was only finished when the reviewing supervisor decided that nothing more needed changing. On top of that, programmes had to be completed two weeks in advance and then reviewed again once they reached the station.

When a public holiday came round, other people were delighted and we felt like crying, because we also had to finish the programmes for the holiday period, when the supervisors would not be there to review them. Otherwise the review would not be done in time and the channel would go dark, which counts as a serious broadcast accident and costs you your job.

So every week every one of us was turning topics over in our heads at every moment, even while eating and sleeping. If an extra match or a last-minute event was added on top of that, it drained still more energy and time. After doing the work long enough, all you can do is make choices: concentrate on the one programme you most want to make, and settle for keeping everything else safe.

The impression GamesTV and G League gave in those first few years was exactly that. Steady, by the book, CCTV in style, like the Spring Festival Gala, without much change or breakthrough. At the time I personally felt this was the biggest problem GamesTV needed to solve. It needed more energy and more courage.

Which is why I was so pleased that the show at the Mercedes-Benz Arena on March 9 was a real breakthrough. The moment the news came out I got excited and went straight over to the GamesTV offices on Luochuan Road East to see how everyone was doing. I am looking forward to this show a great deal, because I think GamesTV's accumulated experience has reached a critical point where quantity turns into quality. Whether the next stop is stardom depends on this step.

There are many more GamesTV colleagues I cannot mention one by one: Haitao, who was biding his time in those days, the director Wang Guan, always pushing himself forward, my good friend Garry, a programme director, and Sun Jun, who ran the website department. They were all part of the earliest group of GamesTV people. Many others have left but are still in the industry, such as Li Jun, now in charge of the ACE league, who was a programme director in the esports department back then.

G League is like our child. We watched her born and watched her grow, and although we have left to do other things, we are still delighted to see the daughter of the house coming of age, and we hope to see her flower and bear fruit in time.