Cameras flashed and fans screamed, as Liu Mou stepped into the spotlight on a sweltering summer evening.
In the industrial heartland city of Wuhan, tens of thousands of spectators jam-packed the waterside strip that bore witness to Chairman Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) iconic swims across the Yangtze River half a century ago.
In unison, the mob roared “hubby” — the moniker jokingly assigned to many male celebrities in China — and Liu, 28, waved back with a smirk. The crowd was mostly men.
Photo: Bloomberg
Their adulation was a testament to Liu’s status — not as marriage material — but as one of the brightest stars among China’s gamers. Liu and his fans were on the waterfront for a carnival celebrating the industry, hosted by one of China’s largest game-streaming companies, Douyu (鬥魚).
Liu is its biggest celebrity. Every day, he spends at least four hours playing League of Legends and other popular titles, streamed to more than 10 million fans. Here, at the carnival, they were getting a chance to see him in person.
For two nights, out of his own pocket, Liu bought dinner for 3,000 of his followers at two nearby restaurants. As he shuttled between tables of noodles and crayfish for selfies, groupies swarmed to pat his rotund belly, and he laughed out loud. It was an endeavor to thank his fans.
Photo: Reuters
“I had a hard time taking care of everyone,” Liu said.
The three-day festival raked in about 20 million yuan (US$2.9 million) in ticket sales, and it’s all part of the race to create China’s equivalent of Amazon’s Twitch, only bigger and potentially more profitable.
NEW REVENUE STREAMS
Photo: EPA-EFE
Douyu is counting on people like Liu to generate revenue via virtual gifts bestowed by fans, potentially showing tech giants like Facebook and Amazon a new way to monetize game-streaming beyond advertisement and sponsorship.
Liu and Douyu’s fate are also intertwined by the same challenge: to prove their spectacular rise is more than a fad but can withstand competition, cash burn and government censorship. Analysts predict the industry could grow to be a US$3 billion business in China.
“I choose Douyu because the platform has accumulated a huge base of League of Legends fans,” said Liu, better known by his moniker PDD. “So far our success is built upon each other, and we complement each other.”
Photo: AFP
Twitch, acquired by Amazon for nearly US$1 billion in 2014, is the dominant game-streaming platform in the US. Yet its absence from China — due to a government ban — has given local start-ups a chance to fight for the world’s largest gaming market.
Unlike Twitch, which has multiple revenue streams like subscriptions and ads, Chinese platform operators live and die on virtual gifts from fans.
Liu plays exclusively on Douyu, and that partnership is key for the company, which went public in New York last month. 91 percent of Douyu’s revenue came from virtual gifts in the quarter ended March.
Photo: Bloomberg
Liu alone may have contributed as much as three percent of Douyu’s revenue in the second quarter, according to Ke Yan, a Singapore-based analyst with Aequitas Research. He based his analysis on stats from xiaohulu.com, which monitors virtual gift spending across Chinese streaming services.
RAGS TO RICHES
Liu’s ability to turn his Internet addiction into a fortune reflects a shift in values and consumption amid rising wealth in China.
As a teenager, Liu disobeyed his parents when he moved to Shanghai to become a professional gamer for one of the world’s most popular games, League of Legends. Back then, he earned a monthly salary of just US$200. He lied to his parents that he was getting as much as US$440,000 a year. Plain steamed buns were his go-to food. KFC was a luxury.
It didn’t take long for him to establish a name in the professional gaming world. By putting in more than 15 hours a day for training, he became captain of Invictus Gaming, one of China’s top e-sports clubs, which won the country its first League of Legends World Championship last year.
After he retired in 2014, Liu began to stream his gaming sessions full-time on various platforms. Now he lives in a 300 square-meter downtown apartment, where he broadcasts at least four hours a day to his 10 million Douyu subscribers. One of his few regrets is treating himself to a white Ferrari, as he almost never goes out.
Over the years Liu built a laid-back, wacky persona. When his avatar dies, he yells, “I got cracked open,” a phrase that spawned a world of memes. One time he got so excited about unearthing a rare virtual weapon that he fell off his chair. Another time he spilled water all over his trousers but had no time to change in the middle of a game. “Leak! We have a leak!” Liu cried out to his girlfriend.
Liu’s fans lavish him with virtual fish balls and rockets, ranging from a few pennies to US$300 per item. Hardcore devotees like Sun Yi, 22, traveled 24 hours on a train from his village to join the meetup at one of the crayfish restaurants.
Wang Jie, a 20-year-old college student, spent months saving up for a plane ticket to Wuhan after watching Liu play League of Legends every night for years. She remembers exactly the moment Liu added her on instant messaging service WeChat — at 2:19am sharp. She was so excited she had to take laps around a soccer field to calm herself down.
Neither Sun nor Wang was disappointed. At Douyu’s festival they mingled with thousands, many dressed as elves and warriors — popular gaming avatars — and sauntered down the 1.5km-long riverside park. On stage, streamers battled away sitting in Tron-like LED lit boxes, while their hack-and-slash feats were projected onto two giant screens.
STRATEGIC FIGHTERS
Twitch’s former biggest star, Fortnite gamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, has said he earns almost US$7 million a year through paid subscribers on the platform alone.
Liu might well rival that. Platforms like Douyu pay top gamers like him at least US$4 million a year to retain them exclusively, said Liu. He also redeems money from virtual gifts from followers, after giving Douyu half the cut.
The battle to be the biggest game-streaming platform is costly. The cash burn on marketing and retaining top performers has caused investors to question the business model. Douyu’s archnemesis, Huya (虎牙), is trading at only half of its June peak last year.
That doesn’t bode well for Douyu. Despite having a larger user base and more top performers, Douyu lags behind Huya on margin and revenue.
“Notwithstanding Douyu’s strong first quarter performance, Huya is simply a better business,” said Arun George, a London-based analyst at Global Equity Research. “Huya’s higher monetization is likely due to its apps, which enable users to more easily search and discover content that resonates with their personal tastes.”
Huya declined to make executives available for an interview.
The cutthroat competition has edged out smaller players, including Panda TV (熊貓直播), Liu’s previous employer. Its downfall has made way for Tencent (騰訊) to dominate game-streaming in China.
The social media giant has its own e-sports site, called eGame (企鵝電競), in addition to backing Douyu and Huya. It owns a 37.2 percent stake in Douyu and 34.6 percent in Huya.
Tencent didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Chen Shaojie, 35, founded Douyu five years ago, inspired by Twitch’s success. He says the company’s advantage over Huya is its bigger user base and wider game offerings, which in time will help it generate more revenue.
“Top streamers are extremely valuable for us,” said Chen, who owns a 13.3 percent stake in Douyu. “After we’re public, we’ll become more experienced with monetization.”
As a public company Douyu will also come under more scrutiny. Streamers often need to spend their own money to buy fan support — a common industry practice that calls into question whether company revenue is inflated.
Soon after Douyu signed on Liu in March, he spent nearly 20 million yuan (US$2.9 million) to buy himself votes during Douyu’s annual online idol competition. Half of that money goes to Douyu, and the other half returns to Liu’s pocket. Douyu’s CEO confirmed this.
“These ‘fake’ votes will be still counted as revenue as, under accounting standards, the streamer will be considered a paying customer,” said Global Equity Research’s George. “Douyu’s focus on top streamers makes it more susceptible to this issue compared to Huya.”
Censorship is always another concern. Accounts with millions of followers can get wiped in a day if regulators deem what they post improper. Last year, a top performer got banned because she made fun of Japan’s invasion of China.
Liu learned from their mistakes. He stopped smoking on camera and even donated two million yuan (US$290,000) to a school in one of China’s poorest counties.
“Your personality and what you say and do can have a huge influence on fans,” Liu said. “You have to be careful about a lot of stuff.”
Companies like Douyu deploy armies of censors to police virtual content that falls afoul of Beijing. There’s no tolerance for the slightest political satire.
No potential risk is too small: Douyu originally planned to throw this year’s carnival at the end of May, but postponed the event for two weeks because authorities were wary of public gatherings around the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to Douyu organizers who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters. Douyu’s CEO said the delay was due to road construction near the venue, citing a previous company statement.
Liu is aware that he won’t be this famous forever. Millions of streamers on Douyu toil for more than four hours a day on the platform, and the rise of a new star player could mean less income for Liu.
So he’s planning for the future. In August last year, Liu opened a training camp, which grooms about two dozen teenagers for top games like League of Legends and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. He earns money when e-sports clubs sign on his proteges.
Earlier this year, Liu also led a 125 million yuan (US$17.7 million) funding round for a talent agency called Elephant Entertainment, which recruits and promotes thousands of streamers. In April, it garnered a 1 billion yuan (US$142 million) valuation and the backing of Tencent.
Douyu’s founder is also looking for a second act. China’s game-streaming industry has been experiencing a slowdown in growth, partly due to the rise of short video apps like ByteDance’s Douyin (抖音), the domestic version of TikTok.
At Douyu’s headquarters in Wuhan’s Optics Valley tech hub, a pair of Siamese fighting fish swim in the tank near the front desk. The popular aquarium species, known for being aggressive and territorial, is a reminder of competition and where the start-up gets its name from. Douyu literally means “fighting fish.”
“One tank cannot house two fish,” a sign reminds visitors.
Feces, vomit and fossilized food from inside stomachs have provided new clues into how dinosaurs rose to dominate Earth, a new study revealed on Wednesday. Scientists have discovered plenty about dinosaurs — particularly about how they vanished off the face of the planet 66 millions years ago. But “we know very little about their rise,” said Martin Qvarnstrom, a researcher at Sweden’s Uppsala University and the study’s lead author. Dinosaurs first appeared at least 230 million years ago, fossils have shown. But they would not become the world’s dominant animal until the start of the Jurassic Period some 30 million years later. What caused this
The Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道) draws its name from the idea that each hiker starting at the summit of Jade Mountain (玉山) and following the trail to the coast is like a single raindrop. Together, many raindrops form life and prosperity-bringing waterways. Replicating a raindrop’s journey holds poetic beauty, but all hikers know that climbing is infinitely more appealing, and so this installment picks up where the last one left off — heading inland and uphill along the 49.8-kilometer Canal Trail (大圳之路) — second of the Greenway’s four sections. A detailed map of the trail can be found
“Bro, I can’t wait for my first dead body,” wrote an 11-year-old boy on Instagram in Sweden, where gangs recruit children too young to be prosecuted as contract killers on chat apps. “Stay motivated, it’ll come,” answered his 19-year-old contact. He went on to offer the child 150,000 kronor (US$13,680) to carry out a murder, as well as clothes and transport to the scene of the crime, according to a police investigation of the exchange last year in the western province of Varmland. In this case, four men aged 18 to 20 are accused of recruiting four minors aged 11 to 17
Dec 2 to Dec 8 It was the biggest heist in Taiwanese history at that time. In the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1982, two masked men armed with M16 assault rifles knocked out the driver of a United World Chinese Commercial Bank (世華銀行) security van, making away with NT$14 million (worth about NT$30 million today). The van had been parked behind a post office at Taipei’s Minsheng E Road when the robbers struck, and despite the post office being full of customers, nobody inside had noticed the brazen theft. “Criminals robbing a
RSS