Chapter 6. Huang Feng, Founder of Wangyu Internet Café

A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 六 黄锋 网鱼网咖创始人

First published in the author's Zhihu column on September 28, 2015: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/20224791

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.

In October 1998, Huang Feng (黄锋) had just turned twenty. With 30,000 yuan from his family and another 6,000 he had borrowed himself, he bought six computers and opened a computer room, an early form of the internet café, out in the suburban district of Songjiang in Shanghai. The machines could be used to play games and nothing else. They were not even connected to the internet.

Seventeen years later, the premium internet café chain he founded, Wangyu Internet Café (网鱼网咖), had spread across 54 Chinese cities with 251 outlets, 3,000 employees and 4.8 million registered paying members. It had also moved into international markets, opening branches in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States, and had become, in every sense, the leading internet café brand in China.

All of it began with a chance conversation.

One day in 1998, Huang Feng had walked out of yet another job. His mother asked him what he had been doing with himself lately. Playing games at the computer room in Songjiang town, he said. How much does it cost, she asked. Five yuan an hour, he said. She thought for a moment and said, why don't you open one yourself?

Huang Feng was delighted. It struck him as a very good idea, not because he could see where the business might lead, but because it meant that from then on he would be able to play games without paying for them.

Before long, though, he worked out how shrewd his mother had been.

He had no time to play at all.

Once the computer room opened, business was excellent. All six machines were occupied from morning to night, and he had to mind the shop and look after his customers, which left him no chance to play.

Even so, Huang Feng says that looking back now, that was the happiest time of his life.

Between 1998 and 2000 the internet spread rapidly across China, and Huang Feng's computer room turned into an internet café. In China that means a hall full of machines that people come to play games on together, rather than somewhere to check email.

As a small café owner who never had to worry about custom, he ate and slept on the premises. There was nothing much to think about and not a great deal to do, so whenever he had a moment he played games and went online, completely immersed in the virtual world. Red Alert, StarCraft, Age of Empires, text-based MUDs, Red Moon (红月), King of Kings (万王之王), Stone Age (石器时代): he caught every one of the waves as esports and online gaming erupted in China. Takings kept improving, and as the money came in he added machines, going from six to twelve, then twenty-four, forty-eight and ninety-six. The café doubled in size every six months.

That feeling of doing what he loved every day while watching the business grow step by step is something he still looks back on fondly.

Growth, of course, came with plenty of trouble and hard lessons.

For one thing, he had no business licence, so the Administration for Industry and Commerce (工商局) confiscated his computers and fined him. Two or three times a year, almost without fail, his machines were carted off.

Why not just apply for a licence, I asked.

Huang Feng gave a wry smile. I wanted to, he said, but back then the Administration had no category of business called an internet café. We applied, but they could not issue one.

So every time his computers were seized he went through the routine of handing over a few thousand yuan to buy them back, and then carried on trading. Only in 2000, when licences became available, did the problem ease off.

After that things went smoothly. From 2000 to 2002 the café took between 2,000 and 8,000 yuan a day. He was the owner, the technician and the cashier all at once, and his monthly outgoings came to little more than rent and utilities. He did not even need to factor depreciation into his running costs, because all the computers had been bought new.

In 2002, Huang Feng registered his first company, Fengyu (封雨), and opened his first branch soon afterwards. The company entered a period of expansion and the headcount grew quickly. This was no longer a one-man shop, and to keep the business healthy Huang Feng laid down several rules for how it would be run.

1. No minors, and everything done by the book.

2. Stay on the premium road.

From his very first outlet, the design of his cafés had real character. His prices were always higher than his competitors', and so were his facilities and his service.

In 2003, during the SARS outbreak, Fengyu's cafés did not close, because plenty of customers still came in to go online wearing face masks. The business ran at a loss for ten months, and yet the cafés kept disinfecting keyboards and cleaning the premises every single day. The district leadership singled them out for praise and personally brought every internet café owner in the district round to see how it was done.

1. Take the penalty, never pay a bribe, win the argument on its merits.

Huang Feng says there will always be people who find a way to slip into an internet café, minors among them. He does not shy away from the subject, and said openly that when a business gets big, gaps will open up somewhere. If the authorities catch you at it, you accept the penalty. What you do not do is bribe your way out of the problem. That is a matter of principle.

But as the saying goes, an outsider, however strong, does not get to override the local bosses. Every place has its own unwritten rules, and sticking to your principles always has a price.

As the company expanded across the country it ran into a great many of these local bosses. Gangsters smashed up its computers on numerous occasions, there were all kinds of threats against him personally, there were messages passed down through local officials telling him to clear out, and some people even came to his office and swore at him to his face.

More than once, at the risk of a beating, he said to a furious competitor, did you build your internet café up by fighting? Let us compete fairly, on customer service, and raise the standard of the trade together so that the market grows for everybody.

Some of them carried on making trouble after hearing that. Others became friends he respected and who respected him.

He always argued his case on reason, and if the worst came to the worst he would swallow the loss and pull out. Several million yuan of investment written off was a common enough occurrence during the expansion years.

In 2006, to take the company up another level, Huang Feng registered Wangyu (网鱼). The name came out of a discussion among the staff, who wanted the company to be "a happy fish in the ocean of the internet".

His route of expansion was interesting too. He avoided central Shanghai and went to Suzhou and Nanjing first.

Shanghai at the time belonged to Dongfang Wangdian (东方网点). With demand for internet cafés soaring and licences scarce, Dongfang Wangdian grew rapidly by selling franchise licences, and for a while its sign seemed to be everywhere in the city. But the company made one fatal mistake. It did not manage its franchised outlets under a single standard, and that set the stage for its rapid collapse later on.

Making his first five million yuan set Huang Feng thinking about his life again.

Around 2004, with seven or eight branches already open, he suddenly realised that the money he had made was enough not only to buy a flat in central Shanghai and a good car, but to marry and have children as well.

It shook him. For a man whose material wants were modest, it meant he would never have to worry about making a living again.

With the material side largely settled, something else in him woke up, and Huang Feng fell to brooding.

What is the value of a human life?

Once you have a family and a career, a wife and a child, a car and a flat, what is the point of working hard?

The company keeps getting bigger and there are more and more employees. Where am I supposed to steer this shipload of people?

What is my new goal in life? These questions, which had never once occurred to him before, were now piled up in front of him for the first time.

He realised all at once that the days of the small internet café owner with nothing to think about and nothing to worry about, who only had to sit in his shop playing games and taking the money, were gone for good.

So what was he going to do?

The first thing Huang Feng thought of was changing the contempt in which the public held internet café operators.

And contempt it was. In that era society looked down on anyone who ran an internet café. In the public mind these were dens of pornography, gambling and drugs, places that ruined children.

Huang Feng badly wanted to change that view, and the way he went about it was rather naive. He opened a factory and went into manufacturing, with something of the old idea of saving the country through industry about it. It did no good at all. Nothing changed.

He began to read, and read obsessively. Biographies of every famous name, Li Ka-shing, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the rest, along with classical histories, self-help and success literature, and books on religion and faith. If it belonged to the field of spiritual enquiry, he read it. Whenever he had time he travelled the world to visit large companies, going to Silicon Valley to look at new technology and to New York for trade shows.

Then one day in 2007 somebody gave him an iPhone, the first-generation model. He was astounded. So a good product really could change the world. From that point on he became a wholehearted admirer of Steve Jobs.

Huang Feng says he is a deeply emotional man. He wept his way through the Steve Jobs biography, reading each chapter very slowly, treasuring it, so unwilling to let it end that he could not bring himself to finish it in one go.

He said this with complete candour, without a flicker of hesitation in his eyes, and the sentiment seemed quite at odds with a man who employs 3,000 people.

During Jobs's final years, Huang Feng began to form a new outlook on the world and a new set of values. Changing the world through a product became his goal, and that shift put Wangyu in step with the times once again.

In 2008, China's internet café trade was on the brink of collapse.

There were many reasons: ageing equipment, a badly saturated market, a price war that grew more brutal by the month, and rising personal computer ownership, which cut the need to go to a café to get online in the big cities. The whole trade had the look of a frail old man in his last years, shivering in the cold.

Cafés were closing in large numbers. Wangyu's own trading position was not encouraging either. Some operators turned to an even more savage race to the bottom, cutting costs as hard as they could, and the surroundings and service in their cafés grew steadily worse.

Huang Feng's view was that public demand for internet cafés still existed. The rise of esports was bound to bring more people into cafés for entertainment, and the nature of the internet café was about to change from "somewhere to go online if you do not own a computer" into a service venue for entertainment, socialising and meeting friends. Demand of that kind would set a far higher bar for a café's surroundings, its hardware and the attitude of its staff.

After discussing it inside the company, Wangyu embarked on an experiment that carried enormous risk and enormous cost. This was the first Wangyu Internet Café, on Tianyaoqiao Road in Xujiahui, Shanghai, an internet café built at great expense with first-class surroundings, first-class computer equipment and first-class service.

Huang Feng says it really was an experiment, a gamble taken against the current at a time when the entire trade was in the doldrums. Had it failed, there might well be no company today.

It opened, and then lost money for ten months straight. Those losses hurt, because rents in that part of the city were astronomical. Wangyu held on regardless.

"From the eleventh month, we noticed that people were queueing outside to get online," Huang Feng says, laughing.

The experiment had worked. What followed was replication of the model and the start of expansion, but a new problem now stood in Wangyu Internet Café's way. There was not enough money.

With Dongfang Wangdian's failure still fresh in his mind, Huang Feng did not want franchised outlets, because he did not want the standard of service to be diluted. So as late as 2010, most Wangyu outlets were company-owned and there were no franchises. Each new outlet cost around three million yuan to open, which was a very expensive way to grow.

Yet Wangyu, which could now see the market clearly, had to expand quickly in order to claim it. The company set out a plan to open 300 outlets in a single year, and to make it happen Huang Feng and his team went looking for investment everywhere.

The years from 2008 to 2010, however, ran straight into the global financial crisis. The fundraising failed. In the end only 30 outlets were opened, and two shareholders left the company one after the other. All of this made Huang Feng reconsider the franchise model.

But how do you guarantee the quality of service in a franchised outlet?

That turned into another long process of trial and error. Wangyu built a very detailed management system. The manager of a franchised outlet is appointed directly by Wangyu head office, and the fitting out and layout are done by Wangyu. These measures do as much as possible to hold the balance between expansion and service quality.

Huang Feng has also begun running some new experiments.

One is Yupaopao (鱼泡泡), a social app built around the locations of Wangyu Internet Café outlets. It can already be used to check on a phone, in advance, whether a café is full, and to book a seat. And on September 21, 2015, the company opened its first Wangyu Esports Arena (网鱼电竞馆), the flagship outlet at the Workers' Stadium in Beijing.

Wangyu still has plenty of problems, and Huang Feng is still looking for ways to keep exploring and improving.

Huang Feng, founder of Wangyu Internet Café.