Chapter 18. From Clubs to Leagues

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十八 从俱乐部到联盟的演变

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 7, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19632128

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.

Zax and KinG are asked the same question all the time: how does the WE club choose its players?

Every time it comes up, the two of them are stuck. It is not that they do not want to answer. It is that there is almost no answer that can be quantified and be right every time. Understanding a person is hard. Choosing the right person is harder. It has been that way throughout history, otherwise the stories of Bo Le, the only man who could recognise a horse that could run a thousand li, and of the musician Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi, the one listener who truly understood his playing, would not still be told a thousand years later.

Esports, in the end, is something that happens between people. If a game had only one player there would be no competition at all. So wherever there is esports there are crowds, and wherever there are people there is a jianghu, a world of rival factions and personal loyalties. The jianghu itself is not complicated. What is complicated is human nature.

This chapter looks at human nature from the perspective of esports.

A sense of belonging

Back in the years when arcade games were popular, forming a team and arranging matches was already nothing unusual. People want to belong, and they want to find others like themselves. Between 1998 and 2003, in the StarCraft and Counter-Strike years, legion-style teams had registered members across the whole country, often tens of thousands of them. The blossoming of the internet and of web technology made that sense of belonging explode in that period. But these huge legion-style organisations were very loosely managed, with no clear or fixed relationships between the people in them, so they were bound to burn brightly for one stage only and then become the past.

China's first professional esports team

I will not say much about the club formats of the amateur and semi-professional years, because most of them were not stable.

Let me talk instead about what I personally consider China's first professional esports team: China.V, which was active in the Counter-Strike years around 2003. Plenty of people will disagree with me, because even before that there had been many famous "professional" teams in Counter-Strike alone, let alone in the StarCraft era.

Wait a moment. Let me finish describing China.V first.

The team leader of China.V was called CJ. He was not the son of a wealthy family, and the team had no sponsor. Keep that background in mind.

Around 2001 he picked five kids of about sixteen, most of them from Guangxi, and put together a Counter-Strike team. All five had already left school. After a spell of intensive training they began a nationwide guerrilla campaign. Wherever there was a tournament with prize money, they got on a train and went.

To people today that may read as unremarkable, but in those years most people regarded esports as leisure and entertainment, and most teams were just groups of friends with a shared hobby. With no sponsor, no comfortable family money behind them and no guaranteed income of any kind, China.V dared to live like sharks and survive purely by hunting. It was like the early years of reform and opening up, when some people gave up a job for life at a state-owned enterprise and went into business. That took not only real confidence and real skill, but genuine courage and vision.

China.V gave Chinese Counter-Strike a shot of adrenaline. People began to realise that the prize money from all the tournaments large and small around the country actually added up to a considerable sum. Before that, in the StarCraft years, prize money had not been high. On top of that, many tournaments of the time wrote their rules without saying that a team could not enter more than one regional division, so China.V would often follow a national Counter-Strike tournament from one regional qualifier to the next, collecting the prize money at each stop.

Behind that ferocity was a genuine push for the real standard of play in esports. It was like a martial artist who spends his days travelling to find people to spar with. Not only does he improve faster himself, he also makes a lot of so-called local masters aware of the gap.

That is why I say China.V was China's first genuinely professional team. Its approach was aggressive and predatory, and although it was ruthless, it was good for the wider environment. This was a team that truly treated the team as a profession.

China.V dominated the scene in 2002 and 2003, playing tournaments large and small from the south of the country to the north. Their prize money income was substantial, but the whole squad was very young, and the side effects of their unsteady temperament kept surfacing. They took only third place at WCG 2002. In 2003 they lost the ESWC final to AS, and AS went to France to represent China. From then on China.V slowly dissolved, and its players moved on to teams such as 5E.

CJ and I have stayed in touch through all the years since. Sometimes, when the subject comes up, he always says with regret that with nothing but a paternal, family-style way of managing people and no contracts, brotherhood in the end could not hold out against the influence of the women beside them.

I have no interest in gossiping about who was right and who was wrong. My point is that human nature is complicated, and running a team on personal loyalty alone does not work.

The three bubble wars in the history of Chinese esports

What is a bubble war? In esports it means poaching players with salaries far above the current market price, so that within a short period player valuations suddenly become inflated. Players then start comparing themselves with one another and switching teams, which is devastating for the operations of the major teams. Because there is no stable way of generating income, the later stage of a bubble war becomes a vicious circle. Investors typically lose heart and walk away within a year, after which a large volume of assets rapidly loses value and the bubble bursts, with strong negative effects in every direction.

There was poaching in the StarCraft and Counter-Strike years as well, but because of the limits of the time very few cases involved large sums, so I will leave them aside.

The first bubble war, started by MYM

After Sky won his second consecutive WCG world title in Warcraft III in 2006, the standing of esports began to rise not only in China. The whole world started to take an interest in this emerging market, and a number of clubs, led by Europe's MYM, began poaching players aggressively.

MYM is short for MeetYourMakers, a team founded in 2000 by Marc Peter Merc Friis as a casual Counter-Strike squad, which later grew into a world-famous professional esports club with top players from all over the world. MYM was headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, with a subsidiary in Germany, and the team was owned by the company Esports I/S.

In 2006 MYM signed the famous Warcraft III player Moon on an annual salary of 100 million Korean won, roughly US$100,000, firing the opening shot of the first bubble war in esports. Many esports clubs were forced to follow suit in order to keep hold of their own players.

That was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Chinese esports, which at the time lived on prize money and had built no stable ability to generate income. WE's Korean squad asked for a raise several times, and we raised their salaries to the limit of what the company could bear, but the figure was still a long way short of the sky-high number MYM had put out. So all of the Korean players left.

It badly affected WE's strength at the time. The young players such as infl and TED had only just joined, which left WE with a gap between generations. Even so, we gritted our teeth and stayed out of that bubble war, and we did a great deal of internal persuading. Fortunately, not one of WE's Chinese players left because of it.

Events proved our judgement right. It was an inflated market, and MYM never produced an effective way of making money from esports. Far from advancing esports, the whole episode accelerated MYM's own decline.

On March 20, 2009, ESNation, MYM's former parent company, formally announced that it was ceasing operations, and Frontspawn, the Danish company that took over the MYM team, issued a statement ending all cooperation with ESNation and with the MYM brand. That brought MYM's glory days to a close.

The second bubble war, started by BET

BET, or Beijing E-sports Team, was a Chinese team that made a great deal of noise around 2007, and many people do not know its background. On the surface it was the Chinese division of the European team SK, and in 2007 it broke off that relationship and continued on its own. Behind it, in reality, stood the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, which at the time was a very weighty backer.

Some people may say that the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau does not sound all that big.

You are right. In theory the Beijing bureau does not sound as impressive as the national sports administration. But you have to think about the moment. The 2008 Olympics were called the Beijing Olympics, not the China Olympics, and the authority to actually run the Games sat with the Beijing sports bureau. According to what people inside were saying, the Beijing bureau and the national administration were not entirely on good terms at the time. A sports authority that dared to stand up to the national administration: think about what that means.

One key figure among BET's leadership was Xu Zhuo, the man who actually ran the operation. He was about our age, but he was very low-key and very practical. His family background was said to be red, although he never mentioned it himself. All we knew was that he had grown up around officialdom and loved esports. Those two things meant that on one side Xu Zhuo knew and was comfortable with the forceful way Chinese government does things, and on the other side he was close to the esports scene. He knew all of us well, was solid and unassuming, and often made introductions and helped us out. Among third-generation descendants of the revolutionary elite, he was a rare one.

Because of that background, BET made a very grand entrance. As well as recruiting star esports players at home and abroad on high salaries, it proposed, in the posture of an official government body, to build a unified team league, unified competition management and a unified public line.

Here I have to add something. Over these ten-odd years of Chinese esports, many organisations have stood up and announced that they were going to consolidate resources, bring order to the market and run the biggest and best tournaments in China. Quite a few of them had deep backing and deep pockets. Not one of them has survived to this day. Where does the problem lie?

There are a great many reasons. Let me sum them up briefly.

1. Impure motives. Esports is in their mouths but not in their hearts. The label is only a cover for something else. Once their real goal has been achieved they leave, and the whole thing simply fizzles out.

2. They really do want to build esports, but they have no idea how, and they do not ask. They are sure of themselves and act on instinct alone. The result is that they miss the point, do damage with good intentions, stir everybody up and then drop the project and wrap it up in a hurry.

3. Their roles are too tangled. They are the tournament organiser, a competitor and a would-be rule maker all at once. Those interwoven identities create a contradiction that is there from the root, and one day the contradictions turn into everybody's doubts and resistance.

4. The wrong model. They have the ability, the backing and an understanding of esports, but the model they build does not fit. This is failed exploration.

5. Bad luck. The timing, the place and the people never came together. Simply out of luck.

Success is hard. It requires too many factors, and sometimes several of the reasons above are mixed together. BET's problems were very complicated.

BET's high salaries unsettled not only many professional players of the time but also the tournament organisers. What BET put forward, that everybody should gather in Beijing to play a league, that events should be exclusive, and that sponsorship should be unified and shared, does that last pair sound familiar? It is a classic Chinese official way of doing things, the crude, planned-economy style.

I am not only criticising them here. I am criticising ourselves as well. The monopoly mindset runs deep in Chinese culture. Do you honestly believe that if you put a different group of people in those seats, the new group would behave any differently? They would do exactly the same. That is what human nature decides. Human nature is imperfect, and it needs reasonable institutions to constrain and limit it, so that crude decisions of this kind are avoided.

BET began to run into trouble at the beginning of 2008, and everything that followed repeated itself almost as precisely as a calendar. Players left, and one after another they retired and changed careers. The life of Warcraft III also reached its end in 2008. At that point Dota was still quietly fermenting.

The third bubble war

The third one actually took place after 2010. The lead role belonged to Dota, and the sums involved broke every historical record. This series of mine is not meant to cover events after 2010, but even if I say nothing, you can compare it with what I have described above and guess most of it for yourselves.

That is the trend and the logic of history. I have shown you the method and the tools for drawing inferences. What will happen, and why it will happen, you can work out on your own.

The results of the bubble wars were brutal, but they did not bring only harm. There is truth in the idea that a setback teaches you something. Chinese teams began to take seriously the forms of constraint that go beyond personal loyalty. Teams started turning themselves into proper companies, and a contract became the precondition for signing a player.

Understanding human nature, and knowing how to run a team using both personal bonds and the law, is the mark of the modern esports club. It was distilled from countless painful experiences, and everybody would do well to understand the process, because for anyone who wants to build a good club those two things are only the foundation. How to improve contract terms, how to build a better internal incentive system, and how to form a good company culture and real cohesion are not problems that law or written rules can solve. Those still have to be worked out by the people involved.

The evolution of leagues

The first thing I want to say is that any league is a temporary expression of unified common interests. A league exists and holds together only on the premise that those common interests remain aligned. But the interests of different individuals are themselves constantly changing, just as what any person wants is a complicated and shifting set of needs.

Put simply, in my personal view, any form of league is unstable.

Leagues are unstable, and yet they need to exist, because temporary needs also have to be met temporarily.

The early esports leagues in China were leagues in name only. CCSK and CGA both had the word alliance in their names, but there was no real, effective operation behind it.

In my personal view, the first effective league system in China was built by CEG in 2004. Once you became an official player at one of its member clubs, it paid you a salary. There were regular competitions, it set standards for player conduct, and it established an effective way of dealing with transfers, poaching and similar matters. Note the word effective in that sentence, because before CEG there had been organisations that tried to solve the problem with intangible means such as influence and public opinion, and the results were slight.

After that, BET tried to build a league in 2007 and failed. Later still, the esports organisations with state backing all withdrew, and most of the grassroots organisations had the will but not the means.

Then, after Dota declined in 2012 and League of Legends became the new hot esports title, the ACE league began to move towards League of Legends. ACE had started out in Dota and was built around players and clubs. Tencent, meanwhile, began to apply esports thinking to League of Legends much more deeply and actually put money into supporting the ACE league. In early 2013 the ACE league's office near Daning International in Zhabei, Shanghai, was being fitted out.

ACE has already begun to display the characteristics of a trade union for the esports industry, and turning it into a real entity may become a milestone for Chinese esports.

Still, it is too early to draw conclusions about a lot of this. We need to listen to what they say and watch what they do, because all of it belongs to the period after 2010, and I will not go into it in detail in this history behind Chinese esports. Even so, we can make some judgements based on the direction in which history has been moving.

Look at Hollywood in the United States. Actors have their guild, screenwriters have theirs, directors have theirs, and journalists have their associations. Different groups of people have their own shared interests. Why should esports not do the same? Rather than pushing for one grand unified body, it would be better to divide things finely in that way. Players, tournaments, media and operators can each find their own organisation and band together to balance the interests of all sides, restraining and supporting one another, and in the end everybody wins.

Some will say that this would produce a lot of disputes and reduce efficiency. But which matters more, efficiency or being healthy and lasting? That is perhaps the question we ought to be discussing seriously now, and not only within esports.