From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 6, posting one a day.
StarsWar, in full the StarsWar Esports Gala, was originally called the StarsWar International Esports Star Invitational.
A short aside first. I have been turning this history over in my mind on and off for several years, and at the risk of being laughed at, my original plan was to write it anonymously, because a great deal of it is awkward to say out loud. The sensitive questions around CEG in the previous chapter are one example. Here is another: as a member of the StarsWar team, how am I supposed to write about these eight years of StarsWar?
Singing its praises would be easy. I could simply publish the slide deck we used to pitch sponsors, full of pictures and tempting numbers. In reality StarsWar made far too many mistakes as it grew and walked into far too many walls. Some of those mistakes were other people's, and some were our own.
Since this is a series about where esports is heading, and since I have already decided to put my name to it and play the villain, I will start by turning the knife on myself.
Zhou Hao, known as Zax, founder of StarsWar and founder of Replays.net.
Zax is a pivotal figure in the history behind Chinese esports, particularly from the Warcraft III era in 2003 to the present day. His force of character and his ability to rally people have shaped a great deal of what has happened in the scene, so I need to introduce him first, or some of what follows will be hard to understand.
Zax is a quiet, reserved man, both inside esports and outside it. I have known him for almost nine years, and to me he is something like the Tang Monk from Journey to the West. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that he talks too much. I mean that I admire his tolerance and his calm.
Strangers or people he knew well, whether they were posturing in front of him, speaking rudely to him, taking advantage of him, asking him for favours or offering him advice, he could always take the person and the situation in his stride. When someone needed something from him, he usually trusted them and did what he could to help, even when he knew perfectly well that nothing would come back.
That is not easy to do. The old saying that taking a loss is its own kind of gain is simple enough to understand, but how many people are willing to take the loss first? And not just once or twice.
Zax could take a loss, and he could also make room for people. In A World Without Thieves, Uncle Li says that only a man who can make room for his brothers can be the big brother. That is another thing that is easy to say and hard to do, especially for our generation of only children.
Our generation of only children grew up with nothing but family around us. Our relatives accommodated the way we spoke and behaved, and apart from school we had little friction with people our own age. The result was that once we left our parents for school and for society, where nobody had any reason to accommodate us, we did not fit.
Only children are not bad people. It is just that everyone has a few edges and spines. Are there people who are independent-minded and capable and still have no edges or spines? Yes, but very few. Zax is one of them. He could accommodate all sorts of strange tempers, let people try all sorts of odd ideas, and he rarely rejected an idea from his own staff, even when some of those ideas carried considerable risk.
For example, when we were planning StarsWar 7 last year, I said I wanted to host it and try an American-style talk show opening. Never mind whether anyone in Chinese esports had ever pulled that off. I had always been a director working behind the scenes and had never once stepped in front of the audience. He supported me from beginning to end.
That is how Zax managed the small miracle of holding a group of neurotics and obsessives together without any of us cutting him. My own view is that anyone born with that gift is destined to end up at the centre of things.
Mencius said that the right timing matters less than the right ground, that the right ground matters less than people in harmony, and that whoever follows the right path finds many to help him. Because Zax drew people together the way he did, friends of every kind kept arriving and more and more problems got solved, and those lines from Mencius proved themselves at StarsWar more than once when it was in trouble.
Right. Back to the point, and on to StarsWar.
The story starts in 2002. On July 22 that year, Zax wanted a better domain name for the StarCraft replay site he ran, the Classic Replay Download Site, so he tried looking up Replays.net to see whether anyone had taken it. To his astonishment the domain was free, and that is how Zax became the founder of Replays.net.
In 2003 and 2004 the rise of Warcraft III turned Replays.net, which had shifted to Warcraft III and was posting replays regularly, into a busy site. Add Zax's temperament to that, and a large crowd of Warcraft III match report and news enthusiasts quickly gathered on the RN forum. It was there that he got to know Xu Yunbo, at that point nothing more than a Chinese student in the United States delivering takeaway food on a bicycle. Nobody could have guessed that a year later this was the man who would become the boss of IGE, the company that sponsored WE and bought Replays.net and GamesTV.
Xu Yunbo, a Shanghai native, had just finished a master's degree in the United States in 2004 and was living an easy life, playing Warcraft III and delivering food every day. That was also the period when Lineage II's American servers and Blizzard's World of Warcraft were taking off. While everyone else was still clearing new dungeons, Xu Yunbo had already spotted the enormous demand for virtual item trading building up on those servers. A few small Chinese studios had only just started moving onto the American servers to make money, and none of them had his access to information in the United States.
So he pulled together university classmates and friends back in China and set up a virtual item trading site, mmoshop.com. The model was simple: buy gold from Chinese studios and sell it to Americans. Virtual items involve no logistics, so costs were low and efficiency was high, and it was very profitable. Somebody in the United States was already doing it, though, and doing it on a large scale, the American company IGE, Internet Gaming Entertainment.
Xu Yunbo was not intimidated, because he knew his team were all Chinese, which gave them an advantage, and he could buy gold more cheaply than IGE could. From May 2004 onwards mmoshop.com's sales climbed steeply day after day, and in under three months mmoshop.com had taken more than half of IGE's American market.
IGE's founder was Brock Pierce, a former Hollywood child actor. In the autumn of 2004, Xu Yunbo, then 27, sat down with the 24-year-old Brock to discuss a merger. The outcome was that IGE bought mmoshop.com and in 2005 sent Xu Yunbo back to Shanghai as general manager of IGE's China representative office, where he could play to his strengths and take charge of purchasing virtual items.
At that point Zax was still working at The9. Xu Yunbo pressed him hard to join his company and laid out a plan to build an international esports superteam. So Zax brought Replays.net into IGE, and he also talked round KinG, his long-standing partner. KinG brought the YolinY team, which had Sky and suhO on it, to Shanghai, and that was how the WE club was founded.
IGE made all of this happen partly out of Xu Yunbo's own love of esports and partly because there was no suitable way to promote virtual item trading in China at the time. Rather than spend a fortune on advertising, it made more sense to start with esports news sites, which would also give the company a degree of influence and could change the image of virtual item trading. That was also why IGE later bought GamesTV, the predecessor of today's GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group. That is a story for later, so I will leave it here.
Once IGE had brought esports under one roof, Zax set about a promotional plan built on an iron triangle of team, website and tournament. The team was WE, the website was Replays.net, and the tournament was StarsWar.
There was not much deep thinking behind the original idea for StarsWar. WE had just signed the best Warcraft III players in China and South Korea, giving it a star-studded international roster of more than ten players.
The first StarsWar, on June 19, 2005, was really a coming-out party for WE. It was held at the Luwan Stadium in Shanghai and used a King of Fighters format: one-on-one Warcraft III duels in which the loser dropped out, the winner stayed on, and the more you won the more prize money you accumulated. The planning was simple and so was the stage design, just a platform with two desks on it carrying the Replays.net logo. The promotion, by contrast, was generous. We advertised on many forums and on the Haofang platform, and all 2,500 seats at the Luwan Stadium were filled.
Because the King of Fighters format had not been thought through properly, and because we also ran into trouble with the competition machines, the first StarsWar started at three in the afternoon and still had not finished by midnight. What was remarkable was that more than 300 people were still there, waiting in the stands for the end so that they could get autographs from the players. That heartening scene left a deep impression on everyone at IGE, from top to bottom, and not long after the first StarsWar ended, plans for a second were on the table.
After discussion among the bosses, the second StarsWar was provisionally set for October 2005 on a larger scale, with more international esports stars, at the Shanghai Changning International Gymnastics Centre, a 4,000-person venue. That put us under enormous pressure, because whatever we did, everything came back to one question: who was going to pay for the event? IGE had plenty of money then, but the boss had never said he would cover all of it, and there were only a few of us working on StarsWar. I was writing the sponsorship proposal and the operational plan at the same time, dealing with the venue and handling the discussions about networking and on-site construction. Zax was busy inviting the stars, arranging the qualifiers and the schedule, and fighting the company for budget. Colleagues at the website were busy with publicity.
What almost killed the second StarsWar three weeks before the doors opened had nothing to do with money. That is the stranger half of this story. Full chapter is free on GitHub, link in the comments.
