Chapter 2. Youku Is Not a Media Outlet: Xiucai, Games Editor-in-Chief

A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二 优酷不是媒体 游戏主编 秀才

First published in the author's Zhihu column on September 13, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19847893

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.

Xiucai, whose real name is Zhou Ye (周晔), is the current games editor-in-chief at Youku. He was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, on July 14, 1981. He loved literature and history from an early age, there were a great many books at home, and he read widely. He was particularly good at reading classical Chinese and devoted to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is where the nickname Xiucai (秀才), the title held by a scholar who had passed the lowest level of the old imperial examinations, comes from.

A sudden idea, and a place at the Shanghai Theatre Academy

In 2000, shortly before the national college entrance examination, Xiucai watched a television drama set at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. He was completely absorbed by it, suddenly decided the place looked interesting, and began to think about applying there.

But a theatre academy offers nothing except arts subjects, and he was on the science track. Could a science student even apply? That was the first question he faced once he had talked his parents round. He asked about it and discovered that the application form for the entrance examination carried an option marked "arts as well as science". Tick that box and you could apply. So, after a good deal of trouble, Xiucai became the first science student to switch to the arts in the hundred-year history of that secondary school in Wuxi.

Arts entrance examinations are difficult. Being allowed to sit one only meant he had found the door.

Which subject, though? Xiucai sat with the Shanghai Theatre Academy prospectus, reading it over and over.

Most arts subjects require years of specialist training. Comparing them again and again, he finally worked out that only one seemed to suit him: the directing department. Its entry requirements looked the vaguest of all. You apparently had to know a little about everything without having to master any of it.

Xiucai says, mocking himself, that people who can do nothing go and apply to the directing department.

If you really think that makes the directing department easy to get into, though, you are badly mistaken. The vaguer the standard, the harder it is to work out. That year nearly 2,000 people across the country applied to the directing department at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and only 16 were admitted. Most of those applicants had rich experience of the world and had worked in film and television, and they were considerably older. A school leaver like Xiucai competing against a crowd of middle-aged people had very poor odds.

On top of that, the directing entrance examination had three rounds.

The first round was a sketch on a concrete theme. You are given ten fairly specific themes, you pick one, you have 15 minutes to prepare, and then you perform a five-minute sketch. For students from an arts background this is relatively easy, but for Xiucai it was the hardest part, since he had never been trained in it. Fortunately, he just scraped through.

The second round was a sketch on an abstract theme, and the theme Xiucai drew was "black". You might want to stop here for a moment and think about how you would have performed that one yourself.

The second round also involved drawing ten wide-ranging questions to answer, testing the breadth of your knowledge and your experience of the world. That should have been a serious test for Xiucai, given how young he was, but his habit of reading widely helped him enormously.

Here is what Xiucai did with "black".

He prepared briefly and then performed a sketch about a sudden power cut during evening study in the final year of senior high. The whole class before the cut, heads down, writing furiously, busy and oppressed. The blankness after the lights went out, the screams in the dark and the release. The awkwardness when the power came back, and the return to the same busy, oppressive silence. All of it in under five minutes, catching a small but highly charged moment of ordinary life.

The third round was a film review. They screened a film on the spot, Ambush (埋伏), starring Feng Gong, and you had to write about it as soon as it finished. That one was not too difficult for him either.

In the end Xiucai came fifth in the country and won his place in the directing department of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, an arts university founded back in the 1940s.

A lot of people reading this will ask what any of it has to do with the history behind Chinese games.

Whether it has anything to do with it I will leave for now. Read on.

Term began and Xiucai started his first year. The 16 students were split into two classes, eight to a teacher, and they studied every subject connected with film and television, though none of them as deeply as the specialists did. The first two years were spent on acting, and in the third and fourth years they took classes alongside students from other departments. The requirement was to understand everything without digging deeply into anything. The directing department's view is that anyone who has to control the whole picture should be a generalist rather than a specialist, and that training general managers and army officers works the same way.

So a graduate of a directing department can go into any job in film and television. Xiucai says a lot of today's serious actors came out of directing departments, but going the other way is very hard. People are sometimes limited by the very thing they are good at.

Every year the graduating fourth-year students at the Shanghai Theatre Academy put on a graduation production together, one from the directing department and one from the acting department, each of them leading students from the other departments in their year. It is the big event of the academic year.

By the time the graduation production was over in their fourth year, only 12 of the 16 students in Xiucai's class were left. The attrition rate was brutal.

The bond with games

In his first year, because of his love of games, Xiucai got to know Zhang Rui, a year above him and now a programme producer at GamesTV. That meeting laid the ground for his own arrival at GamesTV later on.

In 2002 a classmate from the lighting department dragged him into Ragnarok Online, and after that came Mojian (魔剑), released in the West as Shadowbane, and Ultima Online. He made a great many friends on the games scene through them.

On the games scene itself, Xiucai's view is that in 2003 China's first generation of guild players was born in Ultima Online and the second generation in Shadowbane, while the people who came together in Lineage II and World of Warcraft count as the third. A good number of today's leaders in the games industry were already fairly well known in those first two periods. The times make the man.

The Channel[G] games channel

After graduating in 2004, Xiucai joined Channel[G], a games channel run by Mingri Technology (明日科技), where he was responsible for online game news and esports programming. At the time the channel supplied programmes to the GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group Interactive Television.

It was in this period that Xiucai got to know Yaomo, former deputy general manager of the GamesTV channel; Sun Jun, head of the GamesTV channel's website department; and Wu Qiang, Wen Shengke and several of the other people who would later found GamesTV.

Joining GamesTV

After ChinaJoy in 2005, Zhang Rui introduced Xiucai to GamesTV, the company that later merged with the GamesTV channel, and he joined to take charge of online game programmes. Zhang Rui handled single-player game programmes and Yaomo handled esports.

Until 2007 Xiucai worked as a writer-director, making World of Warcraft guides, features and programmes on the cultural background of the game. After 2007 he moved into sales, and since he had come out of directing, knew a little about everything and understood games as well, he did rather well at it.

Live streaming technology had come on a good deal by this point. Platforms such as PPS and PPLive had appeared and MediaCode streaming technology was starting to mature, so content producers only had to push their stream to a specialist streaming platform like PPS for it to serve large numbers of viewers watching at the same time.

StarsWar 2, streamed successfully across the whole of China by a video platform in early 2006, with 200,000 unique IP addresses and more than 2 million viewers, was a case of enormous success achieved against the background of exactly that technical breakthrough.

Xiucai believes that technical revolutions have driven several bursts of rapid growth in esports.

Through the long stretch from 1998 up to 2005, there was no way to watch live pictures of a major esports event in China as it happened. Everyone relied on written and photographic reports. Video streaming was a technical bottleneck all over the world, and for a time the pressure even forced a few audio streaming websites into existence.

In 2004, Xiucai says, everyone streamed using Microsoft's Media Player. It was a makeshift approach forced on people in the early days of video streaming, because if you were sending out a 1M stream, one viewer required 1M of bandwidth, two viewers 2M and a hundred viewers 100M. Given how far broadband had spread at the time and how expensive it was, nobody could support video streaming on that scale. Most important of all, the technology itself could not handle many simultaneous viewers.

Public demand for content forces technological change, and technological change widens the reach of content. The history of games has been pushed forward by those two things taking turns.

Youku's technical breakthrough

Youku was founded in 2006. Because the company kept improving how CDN acceleration was applied inside Youku, playback of its streaming video kept getting smoother, and it was against exactly this background that the shape of Chinese games, the spread of high-speed broadband and the shape of esports all changed enormously.

In 2008, when Youku began setting up a branch office in Shanghai, having previously been in Beijing, it approached Xiucai.

As it happened, his own understanding of the industry had just shifted a great deal.

Before 2008 he had thought content was king in the video business, meaning that the people producing the programmes were the ones in charge. After 2008 he came to think the platform was king, meaning that the distribution channel held the power. So he started looking for the right platform to work with.

He found that Tudou had not yet done any real curating. Its games channel was generated automatically once users uploaded, while Youku had already started filtering content. Tudou, however, had started earlier than Youku and was far bigger, and users were used to Tudou. User habit is sometimes a mountain that is very hard to move.

Joining Youku

Xiucai joined Youku in 2009, where he was responsible for marketing and campaign planning aimed at the games industry. In June 2009, after Youku's previous games editor-in-chief was poached by Tudou, Xiucai became editor-in-chief of the games channel.

What lay in front of him when he took the job, Xiucai says, was a ruin. Youku had no advantage at all against the Tudou of that time. Its rival had more content and a concentration of star creators, Youku Games had barely started, and on top of that a group of former Youku staff had taken a batch of games resources with them. Xiucai had no choice but to find another way in.

Youku Games starts again with esports programmes

Because he had dealt with esports constantly during his time at GamesTV, and after a good deal of analysis and argument, he decided to steer clear of online games and start with esports programming. Dota in particular was on the rise in 2009, and demand for tutorial videos and the like kept growing.

So Xiucai went through the Dota video makers already on the site and decided that two of them, Shuilizi (水离子) and Jiafeiyan (加菲盐), had built up something of a following. He then went looking for new creators as well, DZ and Haitao among them, put all of the games channel's promotional slots behind them, and used old esports contacts at sites such as Replays.net for joint promotion. The snowball slowly began to grow.

Six months later, the Youku gold medal casting team Xiucai had put together had grown from five people to ten. This was exactly the moment when Dota was taking hold in China. Whether the game was driving the videos or the videos were driving the game is hard to say, but in 2010 view counts on casting videos also began to rise noticeably, from tens of thousands at the start to over a hundred thousand, and viewers gradually formed the habit of watching match videos.

By the time Haitao started making videos on Youku at the end of 2010, it took him only three or four months to reach 300,000. Six months after that, 2009 began straight away from a starting threshold of 500,000 views. All of it was closely bound up with the groundwork laid beforehand.

The right time, the right place, the right people, and a push from fate

On December 8, 2010, Youku listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Plenty of money gave its growth a powerful lift, playback got smoother and the user experience kept improving, and while Dota stayed hot, Xiucai had quietly begun building up a stock of League of Legends material.

Youku Games attracted a great many new casters, and they in turn won a great deal of attention through the platform. As commercial routes for casters such as Taobao shops matured, as caster incomes steadied and as the barrier to producing videos came down, more and more people were drawn into the trade. That is where the rapid growth of esports from 2010 to the present day came from.

Against the background of a great era, plenty of people did the right thing at the right time in the right place and rose with it, Xiucai among them.

Over these five years the number of well-known casters who grew up on Youku is beyond counting, and the best of them, Haitao, 2009, Xiaozhi, Xiaocang and Xiaomo among others, all had a great deal of help from Xiucai when they were starting out.

Youku is a platform, not a media outlet

You could say that the enormous demand for esports on video and the stock of video resources Youku had built up combined to push esports forward a great deal, and that casting, an entirely new profession, rose on the back of that platform and became the link between the audience and the players and events. Once that link was open, the old problem of turning esports attention into money was gradually solved as well, and casting became the most reliable destination for a growing number of professional players after they retired.

Xiucai also believes, though, that Youku is not a media outlet but a stage on which every caster can show what they can do. The rise of casters as a form of self-published media weakens the say established media have, to a very large degree, and even leaves the media dependent on content the casters create. It is an undeniable fact that the big casters have more influence than some esports websites, and the many specialist esports sites feel that more keenly than anyone.

How do you balance the relationships between media, casters and platforms? That is the new question this industry faces now that it has grown up.

A new technical bottleneck

Faced with the broad shift towards self-published media, Xiucai says, Youku Games is making active adjustments on one hand and is confident that mobile devices are where the next explosion will come. On the other hand there are still plenty of problems in front of it: how to speed up mobile networks, the high cost of data, an audience that wants content in a more casual form, and higher expectations about how fast news is reported. All of those problems in turn run up against a new technical bottleneck.

To put it another way, a new technological change may be about to arrive.

Who will be the first to break through that technical bottleneck and seize the advantage?

Who will it be?