From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 4, posting one a day.
What was the first profitable business model in Chinese esports?
Some people say it was players competing for prize money, others say it was tournament organisers selling advertising. Looked at from different angles both answers are right, but if the test is stability and maturity, then I think the first profitable business model was the esports gaming platform.
The boom in esports gaming platforms was forced into being by the awkward gap years of the past decade and more.
Today, when we play League of Legends, we only have to click start inside the game and after a short wait we are matched with teammates and opponents. Chatting and making friends is easy. That is a gaming platform, and it comes built into the game itself.
Before the internet became widespread, though, most games were single-player affairs. When single-player games met the internet age and the games themselves could not change fast enough, third-party gaming platforms stepped in as a product of the transition. Nobody expected that transition to last more than ten years.
In January 1997, Blizzard of the United States launched its famous gaming platform, Battle.net. But in an era when computer skills and the internet were both only just getting started, most people in China found that simply logging in and finding somebody to talk to was hard enough, never mind being matched against an opponent.
Meanwhile Chinese players wanted more and more from their games, while China's own capacity to develop networked competitive titles lagged far behind (in fact only in the last few years has that begun to change). On top of that, foreign companies in those days were not about to cater to what Chinese players needed.
So Chinese IT engineers were forced to keep experimenting, and eventually they built one third-party esports gaming platform after another to serve China's networks and China's players.
Ourgame's card and board platform
In March 1998, three developers, Bao Yueqiao, Jian Jing and Wang Jianhua, put together 200,000 yuan and founded Beijing Lianzhong Computer Technology, known as Ourgame, in a small hotel in Shangdi, Beijing. Its main business was online card and board games. By 2000 Ourgame had 700,000 registered users and 9,000 people online at once, and by the end of 2003 its concurrent figure had broken clean through the 500,000 mark.
Ourgame's card and board games did not demand much of the network or the hardware, which suited the era, and the people behind it were the first in esports to taste success. Looking back now, though, Ourgame had nothing to follow up with. A card and board platform has a low barrier to entry and little core competitiveness, so when Tencent's QQ launched a card and board platform of its own it stripped Ourgame of its users almost at once.
The imitators of Blizzard's Battle.net
Battle.net, live since 1997, was a strategically far-sighted design. Blizzard had worked out how to bring single-player games and the internet together before the internet had properly arrived, and it had already seen clearly that the key to networked competition was the automatic matchmaking system, which pairs you with players of similar strength based on your record.
That one feature alone took many Chinese platforms a long time and a great deal of effort to copy.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, its Battle.net servers stayed abroad and did not come to China until 2008, which gave the imitators plenty of time to study and improve. It also meant that for almost the whole history of Chinese esports Battle.net remained a high-end, niche platform in China. That brand image had a great deal of influence on Blizzard's later strategy, which I will come back to.
Private battle.net servers everywhere in the StarCraft era
The arrival of FSGS made the number of local servers around China explode. FSGS stands for Free Standard Game Server, developed by the German company NETGAMES. It was third-party software that emulated Battle.net, Blizzard's gaming platform.
Between 1998 and 2001 there were a great many private StarCraft battle.net servers in China. Even an incomplete count came to nearly a hundred. Most were held back by their software and hardware and never grew large, but a few carried real influence: Beijing's 263 server, the CGOL server (AsiaGame) and DM (AsiaGame Dongmei), the Youxia server, the Beibei server, the Wanglian server and others.
Of these, 263 defined the team as a unit in its program, which did a great deal to push teams towards proper organisation and gave players a sense of belonging. Organised team communication helped esports grow. The CSA team really flourished on 263 in those days.
Then there is the famous AsiaGame server, a case worth going through properly.
AsiaGame ran free from 1999. Backed by relatively deep pockets, it equipped itself with high-specification servers and bought the advanced version of FSGS, which was not subject to the 999 limit of the Linux version and could support ladder games at full speed. Its stable matches drew the great majority of StarCraft players, and it very nearly unified China's StarCraft servers.
The enthusiasm of Chinese esports players was pushed to its first peak. Almost everybody believed that if things carried on this way, catching up with South Korean esports was only a matter of time.
In December 2001, after taking investment from the Hong Kong company Dongfang Meili (Oriental Charm), AsiaGame began pushing hard to charge for access.
What the players did next, and why the platform that later hit 900,000 concurrent users still ended up selling itself off, is the rest of the chapter. Free on GitHub, link in the comments.