Extra: A Few Words on Esports

An extra chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 番外篇 三言两语说电竞

First published in the author's Zhihu column on March 13, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19700908

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 history has passed 200,000 characters by now. I did not write it as a chronicle. I wrote it mainly as a series of lives, because that form lets me go deeper into events, although it also makes for tiring reading. So I want to gather up some of my own thoughts about esports here, roughly sorted, for whatever use they are to you.

To me the concept of esports is very simple. It is a way for people to compete against each other, placed inside the medium of games, with a lot of care taken over fairness. That is all it is. There is no need to raise esports up onto some pedestal of its own; that only makes the road narrower and more niche as you walk it. As I see it, esports is a way of thinking and a way of operating a game, which makes it a boundlessly large idea. Inside that framework, almost any game can be turned into an esport. Playing cards on QQ is esports. Seeing who can last longest at Snake on a mobile phone is esports. StarCraft II, DotA, League of Legends and the rest are all esports.

So why is esports popular without ever quite breaking through?

1. The absence of intellectual property. From 1998 to 2014, almost none of the games generally accepted as esports titles were developed by Chinese people. Even among the esports games licensed and operated here, nobody seriously tried to run one as an esport until League of Legends in 2010. So for more than a decade esports spread in China on its own word of mouth. With nobody earning money from it, there was no sustained or large-scale investment and nobody to lead.

2. In 2004, free-to-air television was banned from broadcasting games programming. Media attention on esports could therefore never build past a certain volume, and without that volume there was no qualitative change in public attention and no interest from traditional advertisers. The digital games channels we have now come nowhere near the household penetration of free-to-air channels, which leaves esports in an awkward position today.

The games ban on free-to-air channels is not going to be lifted. A lot of people fail to understand that this is not a question of money. Picture countless furious parents descending on the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture, the sports administration and the broadcasting regulator. What could any amount of money do at that point? Children using games as an excuse to hide from reality is a social problem nobody can solve at this stage, and quite possibly nobody will be able to solve later either. Which department would dare to carry that responsibility?

1. The user base is still not big enough, and the hour is still early. Every year some outlet or other announces that spring has arrived for esports. Pay it no attention. By now it is almost a fixed routine.

Lately people keep telling me esports is about to explode. I ask them where the trigger is.

They say they do not know, they just feel it is coming.

All that tells me is that the bubble period of esports has arrived.

Since esports cannot deliver anyone returns on that scale, I would like people putting money in to be careful. The moment esports breaks out has to be waited for patiently.

1. The public holds a mistaken belief.

Many people pin the rise of esports on state support, and a great many esports people think this way too. The idea is wrong. It is a misconception produced by a fixed habit of thought, and it is easy to see where it comes from: most of us grew up steeped in the whole-nation sports system, in which the state selects and trains athletes from childhood, and we assume it is the only correct road. Football is a very obvious counterexample. Football had state support and free-to-air broadcasts, and it still could not rise, because it could not get its own house in order. State support helps, but it is a seasoning, a finishing touch. It cannot be the main body of esports. Esports has to build up its own strength first, and make that strength solid. That is what really matters.

As I see it, there are two possible breakout points for esports in the future.

1. Either a new video platform technology appears, convenient and fast, able to replace the influence of free-to-air channels or at least command the same level of public attention. Do you think any platform we have now fits that description? If not, then we risk taking a stride far bigger than the ground can carry. In 1998, downloading a single song at most internet cafés in China took all night. If you had built Youku that year, you could have built it perfectly and nobody would have been able to watch it. That is what the ceiling of an era looks like.

2. Or the digital games channels and online streaming platforms we already have reach the same penetration as free-to-air channels, so that advertisers see the same returns from putting their money there. How much longer do you think that will take?

The free-to-air ban has left this industry badly distorted. The clubs and the stars at its core are not the ones making the most money. The first to earn, and the ones earning the most, are the game casters, who were the first to get into distribution and to build channels of their own. They found the key to how esports grows: turning concentrated attention into money. If the other parts of esports want that same road to work for them, they have to build their own distribution channels too, even if at first the resources only circulate within a very small circle.

After that, all that is left to do is wait patiently. Someone will ask, wait for what?

Wait for the generation born in the 1990s to approach thirty. That is not far off at all. As of 2014, the first wave of Chinese esports people are roughly 33 to 39 years old, the second wave roughly 30 to 33, and the third wave roughly 27 to 30. As things stand, the first wave have either left the games industry altogether or risen to senior positions inside it. The second and third waves are the backbone of Chinese esports today, and all of them have made something of themselves. Every successive wave of the esports audience has grown geometrically in size, and the generation born after 2000 has reached secondary school, which is usually where spending on games begins.

Give it another five years, ten at the most. Look up and the second wave will be turning forty and holding society together. Look down and the generation born after 2000 will be the new base of the pyramid, carrying an even larger body of spending with it. Add an esports title developed by Chinese people themselves, and perhaps by then Chinese esports will be in a completely different position.

Do not show off, do not lose heart, do not attract the wrong attention, and walk these ten years steadily. Get through them and esports will have cleared the hurdle. It will settle in the end into a shape of its own, the way baseball, American football and basketball did. Those sports also spent decades on their groundwork, until everyone from seven-year-olds to seventy-year-olds had played them and loved them, and only then did they form a culture of their own. That is the idea this whole history has been trying to express.

Persevere, endure. Esports.