Chapter 29. The Founder of Replays.net, StarsWar and WE: Zax, Zhou Hao

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十九 Replays.net、StarsWar和WE创始人 ZAX

Written by BBKinG in 2008. First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 23, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19642242

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.

The name Zhou Hao means nothing to most people. Even his other name, Zax, may be familiar without bringing any clear picture to mind. That is because, although he founded Replays.net, the internationally known Chinese esports community, organised the StarsWar International Esports Star Invitational and is the owner behind WE, one of the world's leading esports clubs, the man born in 1981 has never carried himself with any swagger or arrogance. He has always stayed quietly behind the scenes of Chinese esports.

Zax has a very good reputation in the industry, and even many of his competitors are friends of his. Yet few people know much about his past, and few know what kind of dream he holds, which is close to a miracle in a scene as young and restless as esports.

Zax's family came from Chaozhou in Guangdong province. His father was a typical Chaozhou businessman: driven and hard-working, curious and optimistic, and very willing to take risks. He worked in many of the emerging industries of his day and was among the first people to open a supermarket in Shanghai. Zax grew up in comfortable circumstances, with a private driver to take him to school and bring him home. He loved games from an early age and owned almost every kind of console available while he was growing up, including the world's first generation of home machines, an Atari played with a joystick.

That comfortable life was overturned by a sudden disaster while Zax was in high school.

While he was at high school, his father's business partner disappeared with all of the money and was never heard from again. Every debt landed on Zax's father overnight. The capital was gone, the business collapsed, and the string of lawsuits that followed made everything worse. At one point the court even sealed off the family home. The privileged life of before vanished in an instant, and faces he had known all his life turned into strangers just as quickly. Zax watched the whole thing unfold, and he says he can still picture the look on those people's faces today.

The damage eased somewhat after Zax graduated from university, but the episode left him and his family with a great deal of hard experience. It also pushed him brutally to the margins of society and showed him its other side. He says that seeing all of that changed him. He inherited the traits of his father's generation of Chaozhou merchants, the appetite for risk, the drive, the curiosity, but he would never gamble his family's future the way his father had. That would be too foolish. From then on Zax set himself one goal: to give his family and his descendants a better life.

It was that experience above all that led Zax to choose a path in business completely different from his father's, the path of a technology and culture businessman.

In 2000 Zax finished high school and was admitted to the civil engineering department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. That summer he took a job selling computers in a computer market, where he began to learn what customers wanted from a PC, worked out what to say and do to make them interested in what he was selling, and encountered the technical side of computers for the first time.

At university Zax, who loved StarCraft, joined the campus StarCraft team, which had a homepage. How do you build a web page? The question fascinated him, so he began learning from an older student. His curiosity about technology and his willingness to work meant that his web skills soon overtook that student's, and by the time the older student graduated Zax was designing and building sites for many of the university's schools and organisations.

Because he had been running the StarCraft team's homepage all along, Zax gradually went from being a player to being one of the team's managers. In 2002, during the SARS outbreak, Zax and a group of esports enthusiasts successfully ran a Counter-Strike tournament inside the university halls of residence, with everyone taking part over the network without leaving their rooms. That did a great deal for how the university viewed esports. Zax and his friends seized the moment and applied to the Youth League committee for a Shanghai Jiao Tong University Esports Association. It was approved quickly, he became one of the people in charge of it as a matter of course, and he addressed all the new members at the recruitment meeting.

While managing the StarCraft team's website, Zax noticed that a lot of people wanted replays. So he opened a section on a site called Jiaoda Entertainment City dedicated to replay downloads. Very few people came at first, only a few dozen online at a time, all of them there to download replays.

In 2002, as the number of people downloading replays kept growing, Zax registered a personal web space just to host them. That was the earliest form of Replays: replays.126.com, called the Classic Replay Download Site at the time. On July 22, 2002, wanting a domain name that was easier to remember, he tried looking up Replays.net. To his astonishment, nobody had registered it. From that day the domain name and Zax were bound tightly together.

When Replays.net started, it carried only Warcraft III replays. Then the captain of linyu, one of the top three StarCraft teams in China at the time, came to Zax and asked him to add a StarCraft section to Replays.net. Zax agreed, and linyu sent WuFan (Wu Fan) over to take charge of updating it. Six years on, WuFan is now Replays.net's editor-in-chief, responsible for the content of the six sections under RN.

Talking about WuFan's early work, Zax used a vivid and very concrete phrase: "human flesh search". Search technology was not as advanced then as it is now, and many match replays simply could not be found by searching. It meant going through a great many foreign esports sites and players' own blogs, and even building long-term relationships with professional players so that first-hand match and practice replays could be obtained directly from them.

In the site's early days, updating and maintaining it took an enormous amount of time and effort, and everyone did the work as a volunteer. From its founding in 2002 until the American company IGE bought it in April 2005, RN earned almost nothing at all, and Zax borrowed server space wherever he could find it. Wave after wave of Replays.net enthusiasts built RN. Zax says that simply writing down the names of the people who once put work into the site would fill several pages. Besides the current full-time editors WUFAN, SNOW, TONY and others, the people who worked for RN are now scattered across every corner of the world doing all sorts of jobs, and they are still in touch with him.

The moment Replays.net really took off was January 2005, during the first season of South Korea's WEG. The Koreans had already invited MagicYang and Su Hao, both at the height of their fame in China, to South Korea for the televised league. One more place was left, to be decided by public vote, and among the candidates was a then unknown player called Sky, who would go on to win two WCG world titles in a row: Li Xiaofeng. Sky used Replays.net to say how much he wanted to go to South Korea and compete at WEG, and Replays.net launched a campaign to gather votes for him. Large games sites including Sina Games responded one after another, republishing the campaign stories Replays.net put out, and readers followed the links in those stories to the RN forum. From a few dozen people online it went to several thousand, and the forum's user-friendly design and the freedom it allowed made a great many people fond of the place. Membership began to double.

Similar sites were closing all the time back then for one reason or another: hacker attacks, staff drifting away, technology that could not keep up. RN ran into all of those problems too. It was once attacked for two months on end and could not be reached at all. Afterwards, with help from its parent company IGE, RN moved into a professional data centre with a gigabit firewall. Once it had its own dedicated servers, RN found its footing, and both the speed of the site and the quality of its features improved enormously.

The marriage of RN and IGE cannot be told without another slightly legendary figure, Rendey, who ran IGE's Shanghai representative office in China at the time. When Zax first knew him, Rendey was still a student in the United States, delivering takeaway food by bicycle in his spare time. He was a fanatical Warcraft III player and a member of Replays.net. He went on to build a virtual item trading site of his own, buying goods in China and selling them in the United States. His costs were comparatively low, so he soon took a large part of the market from IGE, then the biggest virtual item trader in the United States, until IGE was forced to offer to buy his site. Rendey was 27 that year and IGE's boss was 24. After the acquisition Rendey was sent back to Shanghai to take charge of 90 per cent of IGE's global purchasing. IGE was said to be worth US$600 million at the time.

Zax still sounds surprised when he recalls this part of the story. A member of RN whom he had never met, a man delivering takeaway food in the United States a year earlier, was his boss a year later. Nobody could have imagined a coincidence like that, and it turned Replays.net from a personal site into a commercial one. Looking back on it now, Zax says, Rendey gave us a very good opportunity.

After RN was bought, the company moved to the Wenxin Newspaper Group building on Weihai Road in Jing'an District, Shanghai. Zax now had ample money and backing to expand Replays.net's influence. After discussing it with Rendey, the company decided to build a powerful Warcraft III team. Rendey wanted to buy Friends, then the strongest team in South Korea, and asked Showtime to help make contact. Zax wanted to buy YolinY, the strongest team in China at the time, and contacted its captain, Pei Le. After several rounds of talks with the players, the roster was essentially settled. The new team was made up of the two strongest teams in China and South Korea, and the name chosen after the merger was World Elite. That is the WE team at the height of its fame today.

WE was founded on April 28, 2005. Rendey wanted to invite the Chinese and Korean players to Shanghai for a launch ceremony, and Zax suggested that, since the chance was there, they should do something bigger and run a tournament in a stadium that spectators could come and watch. Running an international event under a brand of their own had in fact long been one of Zax's dreams.

And so, in June 2005, the first StarsWar International Esports Star Invitational was born, at the Luwan Stadium in Shanghai. The stadium was packed on the day. What stayed with Zax most about that first StarsWar was that the matches ran until midnight and at least 200 spectators were still there, having stayed to the end, and were waiting outside the stadium afterwards for the players to come out and sign autographs.

The audience reaction at the first StarsWar convinced the company to keep the StarsWar brand going, which is how the second StarsWar came about. It invited more of the world's top stars and used a larger venue. GamesTV broadcast it live, 260,000 unique IP addresses watched, and all 4,000 seats in the arena were filled, for two days running. That record for the largest live audience at an esports event has still not been broken, and StarsWar created a new model for organising esports events: the all-star tournament with a live broadcast.

With stable sponsorship behind it, WE's results improved by leaps and bounds. Sky, of the Chinese squad, won the WCG world championship two years in a row, and the 2008 and 2009 intakes have improved steadily as well. With StarCraft and FIFA squads added, and with PC hardware brands and lifestyle brands competing to sponsor it, WE has become the Real Madrid of Chinese esports clubs.

Even so, the overall picture for Chinese esports is far from encouraging. Whether as a new kind of sport or as an attitude to life, the idea of esports is well ahead of its time. Zax says that some things need time, that connections and resources need time to settle, and that the esports scene needs time to grow up. More and more people who love esports are entering the workplace, and we often see people starting to connect corporate marketing campaigns to esports, all of them former competitors or fans. What we are doing now is sowing seeds. The future of esports will certainly be bright. The question is who will still be around to see it.

Chaozhou people love gongfu tea, and whenever Zax has time now he drinks gongfu tea at home, invites friends over to talk, sometimes even plays the piano. He has a Yixing clay teapot. A teapot like that has to be raised, he says, and once it has been raised long enough it takes on something of a human character. You have to stroke its surface every day, and it absorbs your spirit, until in time the tea it brews carries a flavour of your own. There is a great deal that is precious in traditional Chinese culture, he says, and much of it we have thrown away. Say etiquette and people think of Japan. Say go and people think of South Korea. We have almost nothing left of our own culture. Zax dreams that one day, when people say esports, they will think of China.