Summary

Publisher control is not a flaw in Chinese esports today; it is the core organizational capability that has allowed the industry to scale. 庄明浩 estimates Tencent accounts for “more than 40%, but less than 50%” of China’s gaming market, with an even larger share of esports; but it “plays by the rules” and is “willing to let everyone have a bowl of soup,” turning league experience, slot systems, and commercial partnerships into replicable infrastructure. The question to watch is whether first parties, clubs, and partners can continue to achieve mutual gains.
Esports clubs “are not a good business,” and are especially difficult to sustain on competition-related revenue alone. League distributions, prize money, transfer-window income, and home-venue ticket sales are not enough to support top clubs. They need platform sponsorships, advertising and endorsements, livestreaming and short video, merchandise, MCN operations, and event execution on top; even then, the goal is often simply to break even. What parent companies are really buying is often brand awareness and partnership access that cannot be precisely quantified—“if the boss thinks the money was well spent, it may well have been worth it.”
A “long-lived game” is not a natural category but the result of sustained operations in an era of high costs and limited incremental growth. The shift from PC to mobile once brought roughly 10x user growth; today, finding another 2x or 3x is difficult, while development spending has risen dozens of times since 2015. Publishers therefore prefer to maintain products that have already captured the market. Esports can turn players into long-term viewers and club fans, leading 陶婷婷 to conclude: “There is no such thing as a long-lived game”—only leagues and surrounding systems built to make one last.
庄明浩’s key warning is that the publisher-built, league-centered esports system of the past decade-plus “may already have peaked.” The old “five-year golden cycle” has been extended, but the variables have expanded from 3 or 4—DAU, revenue, buzz—to roughly 20, including the PC resurgence, new gameplay, content-consumption habits, and national-level events. “Peak” means the system has matured, but also that without innovation in formats, content, and monetization, the next move may not be higher.
More match supply does not mean attention will keep growing in step; esports is moving from a mass phenomenon toward “atomized” operations. LPL’s regular-season traffic on Bilibili has been observed to fall sharply over the past 2 years, while clear differences in team strength have weakened suspense. Livestreams are also competing for the same blocks of time with short video, communities, streamers, and clips. The more realistic future may be “KPL has its audience, LPL has its audience,” with each cultivating its own patch of ground rather than recreating the days when everyone watched together.
Clubs are no longer opening new divisions simply to grab slots and burn budgets; they now need verifiable contributions to the group and a path to self-funding. New titles such as VALORANT and Delta Force bring fresh viewing experiences while requiring new designs for scoring, directing, venues, and broadcast technology. Clubs are simultaneously calculating influence, publisher relationships, competitive capabilities, and cost returns. The era of “pure investment and pure cash-burning” is over; whether publishers can create stable commercial space from the outset of league design will determine whether mature clubs are willing to join.
The consensus on esports entering the Olympics is not that the industry needs a certificate, but that the Olympics need younger viewers—and that copyright and organizational structure still have to be solved. Both guests lean toward the view that “the Olympics need esports more,” but esports lacks the single international governing body typical of traditional sports, while publisher rights, national-team selection, league schedules, and continental events will remain in tension. If the Olympics reduce esports to “turning in an assignment” or an exhibition event without attracting top players and clubs, the traffic will not appear automatically.
Elite players are exceptionally scarce and need institutional protection even more. 庄明浩 describes making it into a professional academy as “several orders of magnitude harder than getting into Tsinghua,” but high salaries and public attention also mean players cannot simply perform well: “To wear the crown, you must bear its weight.” Clubs therefore take on responsibilities as agents, educators, and retirement-transition managers. New investors can still enter, but must first choose among the upstream, midstream, and downstream—and define their strategic purpose—rather than treating esports as a short-term “cash-extraction” trade.

Deep dive

1. Three people, from gaming, investing, and traditional sports, arrive at the same business

Born in 1986, 庄明浩 got into esports in high school through StarCraft, WCG, and a desk mate who was a “master” player. In 2009, he joined Shanda and saw in person, for the first time, the tournaments and players he had previously watched only through PPTV and PPStream, bringing his interest progressively closer to the professional scene.
In 2015, A-share-listed Tianya Technology acquired WCA, ushering in the first wave of Chinese esports livestreaming companies and bringing 庄明浩’s investment work into alignment with his interest. After the investment failed to close, he joined Panda TV, where he stayed until late 2018 or early 2019. He later returned to Matrix Partners China to work on the TT project, then joined TT as it moved from gaming-party matchmaking into acquiring clubs and building a home venue.
有迈体育, where 陶婷婷 worked, originally operated traditional sports events including football, basketball, volleyball, and marathons. After roughly 5 years, the team made esports an important part of its sports strategy in 2017. After failing to win a League of Legends slot, it partnered with 九哲, who had led a team into KPL, and entered Hero JiuJing. 筱宁 encountered KPL through youth-oriented brand marketing and seized the “now or never” opportunity to experience professional players, streamers, and commentators.

2. 2015 was the dividing line; around 2021, another layer of power entered

庄明浩 sees 2015 as a clear dividing line and believes 2021 “may have been another very important dividing line.” Early titles such as StarCraft, Warcraft, and CS were primarily offline games. Publishers had little direct economic interest in China and therefore little incentive to organize long-running tournaments, leaving third-party events in the mainstream.
Third-party events could create excitement, but they were not particularly good businesses. In the online-game era, publishers of League of Legends, Honor of Kings, PUBG, Peacekeeper Elite, and even Delta Force gained directly from extending lifecycles, building brands, and operating users over time. Publisher-led titles therefore became the norm.
New variables have come from multi-sport events such as the Asian Games and the Olympics. Esports is no longer a closed loop among publishers, leagues, and clubs; it must also deal with national teams, international organizations, and public sports systems. Neither “integration” nor “competition” fully captures the complexity.

3. One ring of esports belongs to the game publisher

庄明浩 uses Beijing’s ring roads as an analogy: the first ring is the publisher; the second is tournaments and clubs; the third is communities, media, channels, and distribution; the fourth extends outward to venues, education, and other peripheral areas. Football “belongs to the people of the world,” but esports has clear intellectual-property ownership, making the first party’s central position and larger share of profits almost self-evident.
His historical view is that South Korea was the model for league and commercial operations before 2010. After the rise of online games, Chinese publishers—especially Tencent—took responsibility for building the industry’s system. Tencent accounts for roughly “more than 40%, but less than 50%” of China’s gaming market; if esports alone is counted, the share “may be much larger.”
陶婷婷’s comparison with traditional sports is more direct: anyone can organize a basketball or football tournament, but esports requires the game publisher’s rights. Competition formats, commercial value, and even the survival of professional clubs are therefore tied to the developer’s authorization and long-term investment.

4. Tencent’s moat is not just market share, but a replicable rulebook

庄明浩 describes Tencent as “rational, objective, and fairly aware of mutual gains.” Put more bluntly, it is “willing to let everyone have a bowl of soup.” From City League and CrossFire to LPL and VALORANT, talent experience, bidding scores, stable slots, and promotion methods can all be copied into new projects.
陶婷婷 observes that KPL adopted an NBA-style league structure from the beginning, seeking to share content value and industry upside with clubs. Whether the league is booming or temporarily in a trough, the league and clubs continue to discuss commercial systems and competition rules together rather than letting short-term traffic dictate everything.
She limits the assessment to what she has experienced firsthand: Hero has mainly participated in Tencent’s tournament system, but within those leagues, the experience of standardized construction and continuous optimization has been “quite good.” That stability also helps Chinese clubs compete internationally and gain a stronger voice in the industry.

5. The challenge for third-party tournaments is not creativity, but incomplete rights

筱宁 asks whether the industry still needs genuine third-party players if first-party leagues already offer a good experience. 庄明浩 cites attempts by Alibaba and ByteDance. Alibaba once used its status as a top-tier International Olympic Committee sponsor to promote tournaments, but ran into the same kind of conflict between commercial alliances and the Olympic system over athletes, schedules, and rights. The effort later stalled for internal reasons as well.
牧童, NetEase, and Perfect World have also tried to build related systems, but all still rely in substance on first-party foundations. ByteDance made an attempt as well. “Third parties really have it too hard”: whether rights are released, how the competition calendar is arranged, and who bears the costs cannot be handled like a traditional football or basketball event.
New possibilities could come from sovereign funds or state-backed forces such as Saudi Arabia: a portfolio of 20 to 30 titles could reduce a single publisher’s absolute bargaining power over any one project. For publishers such as Capcom, which 庄明浩 believes “doesn’t really care about esports outside,” a third party willing to put up money and provide distribution and sponsorship could partially recreate the logic of the early tournament era.

6. The Olympics need esports, but esports does not need the Olympics to prove itself

庄明浩 preserves both sides of the debate. Fans want the Olympics to recognize esports as a real sport; the other camp believes the traditional Olympic system needs the younger audience, new topics, and commercial experimentation that esports brings—“not the other way around.” His extreme analogy is that F1 fans and teams have never treated Olympic inclusion as proof of their own legitimacy.
陶婷婷 is more explicit: esports no longer needs the Olympics to prove its fan base or traffic. Instead, traditional sports have lost some of their appeal to younger people, and the Olympic movement should actively find a way through the complicated landscape of publishers and organizations. “The IOC should figure that out itself.”
The institutional knot is that traditional Olympic sports usually have a single recognized international federation, while esports has multiple associations attached to different regions and pools of resources. How national teams select players and how league schedules coordinate with national-team windows are also lessons traditional football and basketball have already learned but esports is only beginning to address.
筱宁 adds an important product standard: Olympic esports must bring together top clubs and players and become a compelling competition that “actually attracts everyone.” If it is merely an exhibition or a way of “turning in an assignment,” mature commercial esports events may have little reason to cooperate.

7. Longevity stretches the five-year cycle, but makes the operating model more complex

Early esports operators assumed a game had a “five-year golden cycle.” In the publisher era, Dota, League of Legends, Honor of Kings, and Peacekeeper Elite all exceeded that horizon. 庄明浩 still keeps the uncertainty in his phrasing: “Peacekeeper Elite is in its eighth year, right? It should be in its ninth.”
A longer lifecycle does not make operations easier. Competitive mechanics can slow the one-off consumption of content, but version updates, new content, and arena events are arriving faster. Younger users’ time spent and patience have also changed, making buzz, DAU, and revenue alone insufficient.
PC games, represented by Delta Force, have become an important battleground again and fit esports particularly well. 庄明浩 says the old model had only 3 or 4 variables, whereas today it may have 20, 10 of them new. Publishers, clubs, media, and communities all have to recalculate.

8. The league is not an accessory to a long-lived game; it is a tool for extending the lifecycle

陶婷婷 reverses the premise: “There is no such thing as a long-lived game.” Every game has a lifecycle. To make one last, publishers must simultaneously build the product, league, commercial development, benefit-sharing system, and star-making machinery, rather than treating esports as a promotional campaign after launch.
She uses basketball to explain the continuity of leagues: someone in their 50s or 60s may no longer play, but can still watch games, support clubs, and buy jerseys and merchandise. Game tournaments can similarly turn participants into longer-lived viewers and fans.
Hero entered KPL in 2017 and had been there for 8 years by the time of the conversation in 2025. 陶婷婷 believes this at least proves that the league and its participants are extending the life of the event IP. Clubs are also incorporating regional identity, city tourism and culture, and fan spending into operations, turning matches from a single content product into part of an event economy.

9. Publishers are betting on the installed base because of user ceilings and development costs

From the publisher’s perspective, 筱宁 says the shift from PC to mobile once produced roughly 10x user growth. Today, population and time spent are nearing a new equilibrium, making broad-based growth of 2x or 3x difficult to find; short video and other media are still taking time away from games.
At the same time, investment in a new game may have risen dozens of times compared with 2015, making the risk-return profile of new launches less attractive. Without a breakthrough technology or a new opportunity, “doing a good job” with products that already occupy the market fits the logic of a major publisher better than constantly betting on new releases.
Esports therefore serves retention, branding, and content supply at the same time, but it also increases the frequency and coverage of matches. 筱宁 asks the sharper question: “Do we really need this many esports tournaments?”

10. LPL’s traffic decline shows that livestreaming is first losing to the structure of attention

庄明浩 says bluntly that LPL viewership over the past 2 years has “fallen a lot—really badly.” Per-game traffic for regular-season matches on Bilibili has dropped noticeably, partly because the teams are too clearly stratified by strength. He does not offer a full attribution, but acknowledges that the league is competing for the same user time as short video, video platforms, and communities.
A live match is a very “tiring” form of content: viewers have to keep watching, and missing a key shot can leave them unable to understand why the game state changed. That conflicts with the basic demands of today’s content consumption. Esports is also only one vertical—and a highly specialized one—within the broader livestreaming category.
His solution is not to recreate a single universal event, but to accept atomization: KPL, LPL, VALORANT, and future Delta Force competitions can each have their own audience and cultivate their own patch of ground. As in the idol industry, it may be harder to produce a star known by everyone, but smaller circles can still form huge concentrations and build their own commercial systems.

11. 陶婷婷 does not think there are too many matches; the problem is that they are not entertaining enough

In response to concerns about an excess of events, 陶婷婷 offers a different view: professional esports still has a fairly long off-season, and players and coaches need matches to maintain their competitive feel and keep fans seeing them. The more important question is how broadcasts can capture younger viewers with precision.
KPL has added players’ first-person perspectives to the conventional third-person view, while regional home venues are also expected to transmit the intensity of the live atmosphere to the broadcast. The aim is to give viewers an experience closer to the immersion of short video rather than mechanically showing the game.
Her caveat is that short-video platforms have used extensive design and algorithmic optimization to refine the viewing experience, while esports “has not gone very deep in building this layer.” The number of events can remain, but production, visuals, and user experience still have far more room to improve.

12. Every new gameplay format rewrites broadcasting and competition rules

The previous major shift that stayed with 庄明浩 came from PUBG. League of Legends and Honor of Kings use fixed 5v5 formats, while a battle royale match can involve 20 to 25 four-player teams at once. Choosing which camera angles to show is only the first step; whether league points should borrow from tennis, billiards, or use an entirely new system must also be designed from scratch.
VALORANT connects relatively easily with the CS system, while Delta Force’s attack-defense, search-and-extract gameplay and player count have generated new experiments such as China-Japan and China-Korea matchups. Even small differences in gameplay flow through to venues, directing, broadcast equipment, event execution, and scoring rules.
筱宁 agrees that new events bring a stronger sense of sport. The “play to win” tension in VALORANT is powerful, while the first Delta Force tournament was answering the question of “how to make a game centered on search and extraction look good.” The value of a new project is not only the additional slots it creates, but the pressure it puts on esports production to innovate again.

13. Clubs have gone from rich men’s toys to commercial departments expected to deliver returns

庄明浩 notes that most clubs participating in domestic esports are now backed by commercial companies. “They’re no longer individuals or second-generation heirs.” Opening a project requires simultaneous consideration of influence, distribution, publisher relationships, competitive capabilities, and cost returns. Shutting down an old project is now an ordinary business decision as well.
Clubs once accepted long-term losses and sometimes almost no revenue. Over the past 2 years, they have had to think about “cutting costs and improving efficiency,” “making money,” “staying out of the red,” and “not burning cash.” The shift mirrors the broader business environment and is not unique to esports.
Hero opened a Delta Force division outside KPL in 2025. 陶婷婷 stresses that this was not a blind decision to join every new game: even if a complete profit model is not visible today, the club must assess whether the project can contribute revenue, profit, or other clear value to the group over the next few years.
The pressure also runs back to the publisher. Whether a league can attract quality clubs at the design stage, and whether it has the “healthy self-funding capacity” to sustain itself, determine whether it can operate steadily over the long term.

14. Clubs have many revenue streams, but few are truly stable

庄明浩 divides the organization into 2 parts. Competition and training cover players, academy squads, coaches, analysts, and living support. The middle and back office handles marketing, social media, business development, IP merchandise, player rights, transfers, and contract negotiations. The complexity is “far, far greater than that of a normally operated company.”
Revenue within the competition system mainly consists of league distributions, cup prize money, transfer-window gains or losses for some clubs, and ticket sales when a club has a home venue. These are usually tied to the previous season’s results or current-season performance. The problem is that “this revenue is not enough to support the operating costs of a top club.”
More attention goes to external liquidity: sponsorships from livestreaming and short-video platforms, advertising, endorsements, commercial partnerships, merchandise, and cultural-tourism projects. Some clubs also operate MCN businesses or have event-organization teams, and may help run competitions for lower-tier leagues or youth training. These capabilities are only “one step away” from their player, platform, and commercial resources.

15. Clubs must operate as companies while also taking on an educational role

庄明浩 gives the unsparing verdict first: “Clubs are not a good business,” and they are a very hard business. Their core management subjects are a group of extremely young “children,” who differ from the workforce of a formally run commercial company in many ways.
陶婷婷 says players spend several years in clubs during the period when their worldview is forming, from roughly 17 or 18 to 24 or 25. Managers must educate them, help them mature into stars, and meet the owner’s requirements to make money or avoid losses. It creates a “deeply divided situation.”
Clubs are also responsible for helping players integrate into society after retirement, so they do not end a short professional career “useless or unable to find work.” But the operators themselves are often born in the 1990s or 2000s and have limited experience. In practice, both sides are growing and learning together.
庄明浩 compares the situation with South Korea’s idol industry. Young people receive huge amounts of attention and money too early, and “human nature struggles to withstand that kind of test.” Formal leagues can improve the environment through courtesy, discipline, and conduct rules, but cannot eliminate the risks created when championships and stardom stimulate desire. They can only seek a balance.

16. What parent companies buy is often not profit, but a hard-to-price brand passport

筱宁 asks directly: after accounting for all the revenue streams, clubs are still fighting to stay around break-even. Why, then, do companies such as JD.com, Weibo, Kuaishou, and Bilibili keep entering? 庄明浩’s answer is that “what each company wants may be different.”
TT holds an annual strategy meeting, and other business units ask its esports head: “Is there any way to measure whether all this money we’re losing is meaningful?” The question is difficult to answer perfectly, but the loss ratio is narrowing, while cross-business cooperation, resource swaps, and brand sponsorship are gradually showing their value.
His concrete example is that TT was initially a gaming-party product known mainly among players. After its club achieved results, the brand became familiar to more partners outside gaming, making collaborations easier to negotiate. That value cannot be directly converted into cash: “If the boss feels the money was well spent, it may well have been worth it.”

17. Competitive results make a club’s annual KPI inherently uncontrollable

陶婷婷 calls esports the only group business in which operating KPIs are extremely difficult to set precisely; even competitive and training targets cannot be guaranteed with certainty. Revenue may appear to come from 7 channels, but each can trigger knock-on changes depending on match results.
Her causal chain is complete and brutal: weaker results can reduce league distributions and prize money, lower sponsorship amounts, cut fan attention, and depress merchandise sales. If the club’s setup, signings, and performance exceed expectations, it may suddenly reach break-even or even turn profitable.
In theory, a club could abandon competition and training and focus only on commercial operations, but that is “too hard, too hard, too hard.” Capital therefore has to decide first whether it wants direct profit, incremental group-brand value, or IP value. Without those external strategic purposes, the profitability of an independent club is “highly debatable.”

18. The professional funnel is extremely narrow, but the industry chain is widening for retirees

庄明浩 believes that anyone who makes it into a professional club’s academy is an “absolute rarity,” even “several orders of magnitude harder than getting into Tsinghua.” Genuine professional potential appears in ladders, rating points, tiers, and rankings. “Once you get roughly to the right place, someone will come looking for you.”
He cites 灵耀, formerly a support player for OMG: over roughly 10 years, he moved from starter to substitute, switched projects, began livestreaming, and changed platforms. He later still streamed mobile games on Xiaohongshu. 庄明浩 was not certain which title it was at the time, suggesting it might have been the mobile version of VALORANT. The story contains disappointment, but also shows that as platforms, game projects, and job types multiply, former players have more places to land and are at least “not doomed to starve.”
陶婷婷 emphasizes how esports can alter a life trajectory. Without a league stage, some 17- or 18-year-olds might be dismissed simply as “delinquents or kids who play games.” Tournaments let them turn talent into careers, fans, and celebrity status, while giving later generations visible role models. Stars remain a minority, but the industry’s positive significance does not belong only to champions.

19. High-paid players must accept public responsibility, and clubs must professionalize

筱宁 observes that players now need more than strong performances: they must communicate, manage their image, livestream, and cooperate with commercial activities. 庄明浩 acknowledges this as an unavoidable consequence of the online environment. Once someone becomes a public figure, they must meet public expectations for their behavior. Even young and outspoken players have to learn to adjust.
陶婷婷 puts it more forcefully: if a player is only responsible for playing the game well, “that is too easy for you; you do not deserve that salary.” Those who use public resources and earn high incomes from them must also shoulder responsibility for industry education and social image: “To wear the crown, you must bear its weight.”
Responsibility cannot rest on players alone. In the early years, an entire team could be rapidly poached by a new owner; league rules, contracts, and agent regulations now make that much harder. Clubs’ MCN operations and their adoption of experience from entertainment and traditional sports are also natural extensions of their agency and commercial capabilities.
The talent mix is changing as well. 陶婷婷 says clubs once recruited mainly from fans and within the scene, but now place greater value on highly educated, high-caliber outsiders. Only by bringing in external management experience can the industry avoid being trapped forever in a self-reinforcing cycle of not understanding the rules.

20. Enter through verifiable passion; investors must first answer why

For people who want to become players, 庄明浩’s joking judgment is: “If you have to ask that question, odds are you probably can’t become one.” Professional talent is verified directly by rankings. The path is “one general succeeds while ten thousand bones lie beneath,” and desire cannot compensate for hard skills.
Ordinary industry workers do not need to mythologize esports. Work in media, social accounts, IP, short video, business development, and marketing is not fundamentally different from work at a game company, advertising agency, sports organization, or entertainment group. The real advantage is turning passion into knowledge of the game, accumulated industry experience, and actual results—not writing “likes esports” as a vague line on a résumé.
陶婷婷 believes that, from the standpoint of global development and public awareness, this is still a “good time” to invest in esports. But investors must first choose whether they want the upstream, midstream, or downstream. If they choose clubs, they must answer what brand value the club can add to existing industries, or what new method they plan to use to change the industry.
Her final boundary is the most important: once the purpose is clear, investors can enter. If they simply think esports is an easy way to make money and expect a short-term “cash grab,” they should proceed with caution. A club’s strategic value may be real, but it is never an asset that automatically turns into profit.

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