Chinese Esports Out of Control

An extra piece by BBKinG (Liu Yang), author of ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, published after the book. Translated from the Chinese original: 失控的中国电子竞技

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 8, 2015: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/20326974

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 3, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Because I was interviewing the StarCraft Old Boys, I spent two days at a tournament venue, where several team leaders and managers I know pulled me aside to complain. They have all been in esports a long time, and they all feel something has gone wrong with it now. They are anxious, and they have no idea what to do.

The complaint that came up most often was this: the players are out of control.

In the old days, turning professional meant almost no income. Salaries were low and prize money was the main thing, so players trained relentlessly: only results would buy them a decent life.

It is different now. Signing fees have exploded, player valuations have exploded, endorsement fees have exploded, there is a share of the virtual gifts viewers buy on the streaming platforms, and even opening a Taobao shop can make a player a fortune. Set the few tens of thousands of yuan of prize money against all that, split between several people, and it has almost no appeal left.

For instance, at this event several professional teams either forfeited outright at the venue or went through the motions of playing. The champions of the team discipline took only 80,000 yuan, entry was compulsory, and it left everybody unhappy.

Another example: one club's Korean import signed for more than 10 million yuan a year, which averages out at more than 800,000 yuan a month, while the champions' prize for this year's LPL Spring Split was 800,000 yuan. In other words, professional players across China can fight themselves to a standstill to win a split title and still not match one Korean import's monthly wage.

And the knock-on effect of income going out of control is that the players have gone out of control.

The glow of stardom, easy money, swelling confidence, a party atmosphere that never stops, and the high living has begun. The karaoke kings have a drinking session every day, one luxury car arrives after another, and drink, gambling and prostitutes have been picked up along the way.

Once a player's heart runs wild, there is no reining it back in.

The people running the clubs have their own headache. Players used to be easy to manage when they were new and the club held the upper hand. A player who has made his name is treated like royalty, coaxed and waited on, for fear he will leave or retire.

Hard people to manage, and a hard show to keep running.

Look at Korean esports by contrast. After all these years it is still in good order.

Dig into the reasons and you find that KeSPA, the Korea e-Sports Association, is genuinely powerful.

The story goes that every Korean player's streaming contract is signed with the platform by KeSPA on his behalf, not by the club and certainly not by the player himself. All the income passes from KeSPA to the clubs, and from the clubs to the players.

It is an effective way of balancing income across the levels, but it also narrows the range of player salaries directly.

The Korean player dade says that even a figure at Faker's level was earning no more than 50,000 yuan a month last year, with barely any other income. Trainees are paid nothing.

Which is why Chinese money can go to Korea and pull one of their top teams apart overnight.

But when Chinese esports poached those players, it copied the shape of the Korean system without learning what was underneath it.

From the very beginning in 1999 the Koreans used KeSPA to lay down a framework and strategy. They kept player income inside a fixed range and built a brutal competition system around the television channel, forcing players to earn more by playing better.

Where we are now, the casters live in one world, the players in another and the clubs in a third. Three worlds that ought to be part of one body sit in three separate dimensions. Playing professionally pays worse than selling flatbread on the street, running a club is no match for a rich kid throwing money at one, and a new round of bubble warfare between the streaming platforms grows fiercer by the day.

The industry has no rules. An ecosystem is barely built before somebody turns up to break them, and this is not confined to esports. It is the prevailing climate across China.

The league wants to impose order, but the structure was not set up properly at the start. It finally got the clubs under control, then the streaming platforms came charging in, all backed by big capital. Now it could not impose order even if it wanted to.

Dota 2 is in better shape at the moment. The poaching war in that discipline is over, most of the bubble has gone, and what settled out of it is the real thing. The high prize money at The International has become the target every team aims at each year. Even so, things still go out of control there.

The most interesting case is Hearthstone, which is developing very well. Its players have not yet made their names, so things like Taobao shops and streaming pay them little even when they do them, and the only way to get anywhere is to produce results in competition. They have become extremely diligent as a result.

The bubble around League of Legends, on the other hand, keeps growing. E-commerce companies and streaming platforms keep pouring money in, and the signing fee for a newcomer now starts at a million yuan. To get hold of good players, clubs have no choice but to work with the streaming platforms: the platform puts up the money to poach the player, and in return the player has to stream on that platform every month. That eats a great deal of practice time and exposes his tactics and style of play. It is a vicious circle.

If China wins S5, I genuinely cannot imagine how far this industry will inflate.

Chinese esports was already misshapen. Now it is more dangerous than ever.

It is like building a house. Nobody designed it properly before the work started, so it went up a bit here and a bit there. Now some parts of it get plenty of sunlight and other parts leak whenever it rains, and without knocking a great deal of it down and rebuilding, the underlying problems will be very hard to solve.

I think the root of it is this. After the television channel was closed off to Chinese esports in 2004, we took a completely different road, the new road of the internet. That made our start too late, made exploring harder and left us short of long-term vision, so the framework was never properly built. Now there are points where money can be extracted everywhere, and holes everywhere. We want to impose order and cannot; we want to take things back in hand and cannot hold them.

Put plainly, I personally think this is a strategic mistake in the history of Chinese esports, and the fundamental gap between Chinese and Korean esports.

What about the future?

I think that although we started far later than Korea and have only recently begun to work out how to industrialise esports, we could still learn from what has happened and repair the damage. Strengthen central management, take back the points where money is being extracted and put it into the competitions, set high prize money, balance income across every level of esports, build an ecosystem that can be sustained long term, and put competition back at the centre of esports.

That might be one way to go, but it might not suit us.

I do not regard this as central planning or anything of the sort. Historically, when local income was higher than central income and nothing was done about it for long enough, the gap between rich and poor regions easily grew too wide and the country split apart. So the state strengthened central authority and then coordinated support for each region's development. That is really all this amounts to.

It would take enormous nerve, though, and bring a great deal of abuse, because it would move too many people's cheese. Perhaps the chances of making it work would be higher in a new esports discipline.

Of course, this is only my own thinking, put out here for discussion, and I am not certain what I have said is right. We may have arrived once again at the edge of the unexplored. Imitating and copying the Korean model is clearly not appropriate for us. All we can do is break new ground ourselves and learn by trial and error.