Chapter 8. NeoTV and PLU: A Tale of Grudges

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 八 NeoTV、PLU恩仇录

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 22, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19620939

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.

This story has to begin in 1995.

Wang Jue, known in the industry as Director Wang and, at the time of writing, vice president and executive director of NeoTV, worked at both PLU and NeoTV over the years. He had loved drawing since childhood, and in 1995 he made it into the first intake of art students at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, majoring in art and design. There he got to know a younger student named Chen Qidong, who went by the English name Friend and is, at the time of writing, PLU's CEO.

Take Wang Jue first. Although he majored in painting at university, he preferred the company of the students in the drama society, and spent his time studying scripts, sitting in on rehearsals and working on stage design. That is why he went straight into film and television work after graduating.

In 2000, Wang Jue opened his own studio and began shooting music videos for pop stars. Over the next few years he built up a reputation in that world, making films for first-tier singers of the day such as Han Hong. Another director shooting music videos in the same period was Ning Hao, later well known as a feature film director. People spoke of "Ning Hao in the north, Wang Jue in the south". Around 2005 the two of them each changed direction, one moving into film and the other into esports, and their lives took completely different courses. I will come back later to why they made those changes.

After graduating, Friend joined Wang Jue's film and television studio as a partner, taking charge of the business side and acting as the director's agent.

Friend was there from 2000 until he left in 2003. A fanatical StarCraft player, he had already arrived at the idea of a "players' guild". He had watched tournaments being run under whatever rules the organisers felt like, with unpaid prize money and unpaid player salaries turning up case after case, and he wanted a players' guild that would bring some order to the market.

It was during this period that Friend met Liu Qing, known as Alone, who is, at the time of writing, a streamer at PLU.

It was 2002, just after the GOC tournament. Alone had beaten zealot, the captain of SVS, that day, so Friend, who was with SVS, called him along to dinner with a group of people. Alone did not know a single person at the table. The food arrived, and the moment he lifted a piece of meat, Friend asked him whether he wanted to join SVS. Alone thought it would be awkward to refuse a man who was feeding him, so he agreed. Those are Alone's own words. He went on to become SVS's team leader and put up some decent results. Friend decided he was worth having, brought him to Wang Jue's company, talked with him for thirty minutes and asked whether he would like to help found the "players' guild". That was the beginning of Alone's career as the famous "youth who lost his way".

There is a verse for it. Step into the wolves' den and it is as deep as the sea, and from that day on your scruples are a stranger to you.

After leaving Wang Jue's studio in 2003, Friend joined Huang Zhenggang's Yiyang Graphic Design in 2004, still handling the business side. He also brought in Wang Jue, then working as an independent director, to serve part-time as art director on some 3D design projects.

Around that time, the PLU forum and the PLU tournament series that Friend ran in his spare time had built up a certain following. Huang Zhenggang, who owned Yiyang, was a gamer himself, so Friend persuaded him to clear part of the company meeting room for use as a makeshift studio. He then brought Wang Jue in and told him about South Korea's OGN model and about WCG, which left Wang Jue deeply interested in esports.

By then it was 2005, the year of an event that would leave a deep mark on Chinese society: the television talent show Super Girl. Most people know only that the 2005 season produced hugely influential grassroots stars such as Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and Zhang Liangying. What they do not know is the damage it did to Chinese music afterwards.

Let me spend a little time here on a digression, a history behind the music business.

The 2005 season of Super Girl was a huge success in many respects and won extraordinary affection from viewers, but it dealt Chinese music a heavy blow. After that season, musicians left the scene in large numbers, and the music video business was all but destroyed. Well-known music video directors such as Ning Hao and Wang Jue moved into other lines of work one after another. You may ask why.

There are several reasons.

The Super Girl model was flawed.

When Steve Jobs's Apple launched the iPod, it used hardware to strengthen copyright protection and built a model in which every side won: the musicians, the production companies, the music fans and the hardware makers. The iPod, and later the App Store, followed the same logic. Apple not only opened up a broad market of potential users through the quality of the iPod itself, it also delivered real benefits to everyone along the music chain.

Super Girl was nothing like that. The favour shown to its contestants squeezed out large numbers of established singers and also pushed out many existing musical styles. That year the domestic music market was almost entirely swallowed by Super Girl music, and musicians had no answer to it. The arrival of a singer like Li Yuchun overturned the way many record companies thought about production. To put it plainly, the Chinese music industry was stunned by the taste the market had suddenly revealed, and had no idea what to do next.

On top of that, music was being spread free of charge by television programmes, mp3 files could be downloaded free from Baidu Music and similar services, broadcasters had a weak sense of copyright and kept the whole cake to themselves, and record companies were furious but afraid to speak out. Record companies began pulling out in large numbers.

So from 2005 onwards there were fewer and fewer music videos in the mainland Chinese market, and less and less carefully produced music. What replaced them was the rise of grassroots music, songs like "Mouse Loves Rice" and acts like the duo Phoenix Legend. As Gao Xiaosong put it, the Chinese record industry is already dead.

The end result of Super Girl was that musicians boycotted it, production companies boycotted it and rival broadcasters boycotted it. Apart from the public, who were happy to sit and listen for free, every part of the chain was hurt. That is not a healthy way to grow. It is like a restaurant that hands out free meals every day: the diners are delighted, but over time the damage to the trade is devastating.

The arrival of the Super Girl model was revolutionary, and I was a Liangfen myself back then, one of Zhang Liangying's fans. Seen from the level of the industry, though, it was a brutal purge of Chinese music, and all of us took part in it.

Failing to work at the level of the industry is the key reason Super Girl won the market and lost the future.

It is also why The Voice of China now brings in musical elements at every level. After American Idol and Super Girl, people seem to have begun to recognise how serious the problem was. Talent shows today are not only a way of selecting unknowns. They also let established singers win recognition and raise their profile. Yang Kun's thirty-two concerts, the lift to Na Ying's public image, and "High Song", the duet by Huang Ling and Zhang Wei: every part of the music industry took real benefits out of that one show. That is what makes for long-term development, rather than grabbing at short-term gains.

Back to the main story. After Super Girl in 2005, Wang Jue was thinking about a change of direction, and under Friend's influence he had come to see South Korea's OGN and WCG as a promising one. So he began working on PLU tournaments together with Huang Zhenggang, the owner of Yiyang, along with Friend and Alone.

The first three PLU tournaments, held before 2005, had gone down well with viewers, which encouraged everybody. Wang Jue's girlfriend An Jia had trained as a broadcast presenter and also wanted a chance to work in front of the camera. With all these factors pushing the same way, Wang Jue, Huang Zhenggang and Friend each put in around 200,000 yuan (that figure is disputed) and founded the PLU company in 2005. They rented two villas in Baoshan, one for the studio and offices and one as a dormitory for staff. Video distribution platforms were not as numerous then as they are now, so they brought in Lunzi of PPS to take charge of distribution, with XXX handling technology.

PLU had a genuinely good run in 2006. The fifth PLU ran two games, StarCraft and Warcraft III, and drew very high viewing figures on PPS.

Zhou Ning and XIXI joined PLU around then to cast the Warcraft III side, so PLU was no longer a StarCraft-only channel. Doudou, the presenter many people know today, also joined PLU in that period and began a career as a host. Those Flowers, a documentary Wang Jue shot about the state of life for esports players, struck a deep chord with esports fans.

But the question everybody found so difficult at the time, "how does esports make money?", stood in PLU's way once again.

By the end of 2006 PLU was running low on funds. The tournaments had made a certain impact but had not lived up to expectations. Wang Jue felt that PLU's workshop-scale approach had no future, while Huang Zhenggang felt the company could find no suitable revenue model from a commercial point of view. Friend held his tongue and endured.

NeoTV, meanwhile, was doing very nicely.

In 2005, Xiong Jianming, known as Neo, who came from a television background, took a proposal for a games television channel to Zhang Shunde, a man of some weight in Shanghai's cultural circles. Zhang Shunde is the uncle of Lin Yuxin, known as Ken, who owns NeoTV at the time of writing. Zhang Shunde liked the proposal, so the Lin family put up the money and NeoTV was founded in early 2006. Ken was still studying design in the United States then, so Xiong Jianming was the executive in charge of NeoTV at that point.

Neo had approached Wang Jue as early as the start of 2006 and tried to poach him, but Wang Jue turned him down. Inside PLU, however, the disagreements about direction kept piling up, and the project looked less and less promising.

They say a girl's youth waits for nobody, and An Jia, who had trained as a presenter, was more anxious than most. She had dreams of her own to pursue. On one side her youth was burning away fast, on the other NeoTV wanted to build up a glamorous games presenter. So An Jia became the first person to leave PLU for NeoTV.

Once she had moved, An Jia brought home a great deal of information about NeoTV every day, and that pushed Wang Jue towards a clean break at the end of 2006. When he left PLU, his shares were written down to zero. Everything he had earned before the age of 30 was gone.

I think this was probably the darkest moment in PLU's history before 2010. It was not only Wang Jue who was hurt. The other two shareholders, Friend and Huang Zhenggang, had nearly run through the money they had put in as well. Everyone's persistence in the name of an ideal had run head-on into reality.

So: left, or right?

However furiously people argued about that departure at the time, and however completely they fell out, even now, six years later, we cannot simply judge who was right and who was wrong. Looking at the years since, everyone involved has achieved something, and every one of them has made an enormous contribution to the development of esports. Looking back from where we stand today, perhaps nobody was wrong. Fate had simply decided that they would walk different roads.

Back to the events themselves. The arguments were had, the parting of ways took place, and history cannot be rewritten. Wang Jue left PLU in the end and joined NeoTV, and Zhou Ning and XIXI followed him there. The losses to PLU were severe. Xie Yixian, at the time of writing head producer of the programme unit at PLU Game Entertainment Media, had not been working under Wang Jue on the technical side for long and was suddenly pushed to the front to handle things alone. Doudou was promoted at the same time. Fortunately, they held on.

The grudges between NeoTV and PLU were laid down then, and the later feud between Xiaose and Dashi took the hostility between the two companies to its peak.

Xiaose, at the time of writing head of tournaments at NeoTV, was never formally a member of PLU. He was a fanatical StarCraft fan from Sichuan, active on the 8DA forum and the PLU forum, and blunt by nature. Before Wang Jue and the others left PLU, he regularly criticised mistakes made by the casters on PLU's shows. Before Friend stepped back behind the scenes, he had recruited Dashi, whose real name is Yu Xiaogang, then a StarCraft caster at PLU and, at the time of writing, head of SCNTV. Dashi naturally became Xiaose's new target. At that stage, the friction between Xiaose and Dashi was not a conflict between NeoTV and PLU. It was a technical argument between a fan and a caster.

Then in early 2007, after Wang Jue had successfully run the first NSL at NeoTV as a Warcraft III only event, he decided to add StarCraft for the second edition and recruited Xiaose, so active on the forums, as a full-time caster. That set everything off. Against the wider conflict, the quarrel between Xiaose and Dashi was fanned from a technical disagreement into all-out war between NeoTV and PLU. Neither man was out for the other's destruction, though, and there were other motives behind the whole farce. That is worth seeing clearly.

Now the story moves across to NeoTV.

In 2005 I got to know Cody, whose real name is Zhang Yu. He was then in charge of the QQ gaming platform, later became a vice president of NeoTV and, at the time of writing, runs MarsTV. The QQ gaming platform had just launched and wanted to promote itself through StarsWar 2. They were willing to provide commercial sponsorship resources, and since I handled that side, we worked together on sponsorship sales. Cody did bring in resources from a lot of major international manufacturers, but for various reasons the partnership never came off, and with Tencent unable to make up its mind about the QQ gaming platform, we were in touch less and less afterwards.

What happened next still leaves me not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Cody went on to negotiate with the Korean WCG organising committee on behalf of Tencent's LIVE platform and secured the rights to broadcast the WCG world finals. He then needed a partner on the ground, a company that understood esports and could produce programming.

If the StarsWar 2 partnership had come off, I suspect the WCG business would have gone for the next few years to GamesTV, where we were at the time and the predecessor of the GamesTV channel. As it happened, things went the other way and the business went to NeoTV. That is only a small personal regret on my part, of course. NeoTV did a good job with WCG in the years that followed.

The rights landed with NeoTV, which had been founded only shortly before, for two reasons. One was that Neo is said to have paid 1 million yuan for them that year, something even Ken did not know about, which later became the main reason Ken pushed Neo out of the team. The other was that broadcasting WCG was fairly simple at the time. The signal handed over already contained everything, and the Chinese end only had to keep distribution stable. So the WCG organising committee cared about the hard capability of Tencent LIVE, and the rest mattered little to them.

From 2007 to the present, then, NeoTV's main work each year has been organising and running WCG China and broadcasting the WCG world finals. I will come to that in detail later. First, a serious internal incident at NeoTV in 2008.

That is Neo's removal.

I do not know Neo personally, but from everything I have heard he was a controversial figure, particularly in temperament. When he was fighting GamesTV for the WCG broadcast rights, he paid out a large sum, which both broke the unwritten rules and offended people in the industry, and he did it without telling his investors. Neo's later poaching of staff from rivals also made enemies for NeoTV everywhere, to the point that other video media companies quietly joined forces to isolate it. The negative effects ran deep, and some of that friction still affects certain partnerships today.

In early 2008, Lin Yuxin, Ken, came back from the United States and found the company in turmoil because of Neo. Wang Jue had left in anger, and Cody is said to have come to blows with Neo. Nobody agreed with Neo's thinking either. He wanted to build a vertical video-on-demand platform for games, which in today's terms would be something like a standalone Youku games channel. That was the exact opposite of the programme-making approach favoured by Wang Jue and others.

Ken dealt with the matter decisively. He asked Neo to leave the company, then went in person, again and again, with Cody and with his uncle Zhang Shunde, to ask Wang Jue to return to NeoTV. He made clear that NeoTV would from then on make programmes and run events such as WCG rather than build a video-on-demand platform. Wang Jue was won over in the end and came back, and set to work on WCG China for 2008.

WCG China in 2008 was hard going for NeoTV, because they went out and broadcast the regional qualifiers. There were fifteen regions across the country, with two of them running at the same time each week, and out of each pair they picked one larger region, set up a broadcast booth in an internet café and produced a live show.

I should add something here. What they did shows me how much enthusiasm they had, but by 2008 the WCG regional qualifier model had lost its vitality. The standard of play and the appetite for taking part in the regions were both low, and broadcasting them was a thankless amount of work. By 2009, they had stopped doing it themselves.

After that, things settled down. The WCG China national final moved from the Zhengda Sports Center at Fudan University in 2008 to the Everbright Convention and Exhibition Center in 2009, and has been held there ever since. Because the WCG brand carries so much weight in itself, plenty of manufacturers were willing to take part and build stands, so NeoTV began exploring a trade show format along the lines of ChinaJoy. That coincided with the Dota boom of 2007 to 2012, and the WCG China national final successfully turned itself into an esports ChinaJoy.

That format suits a multi-discipline event like WCG very well. When a game they do not care for is on, people can wander around the stands, so the crowd is retained even as it moves, and every side wins.

Because we have had plenty of chances to talk, I have found that NeoTV understands "secondary esports fans" in the same way StarsWar does. A large share of the people who come to the show are not hardcore players. They may be friends or family of the core players. Looking after them well and drawing them in to watch matches matters a great deal for expanding the number of core esports players and for building the profile of an event brand.

After 2010, NeoTV and PLU moved further and further apart in direction, and the grudges gradually faded. Chinese games video media went from the three-way balance of GamesTV, NeoTV and PLU before 2010 (GTV, in Beijing, had relatively few clashes with the others) to the many-sided competition of today. New tales of grudges are still being played out, with a good many more actors, but this history will not go into them. Perhaps when I write the next one several years from now, there will be better stories to set down and more complicated human nature to dig into.

I can hardly wait.