Netease Jumps into E-Sports, Pushes for Stronger Competition in China

I’ve been noticing a bit more talk about e-sports (i.e. competitive gaming) in the Chinese games media over the past few months. As most readers will know, competitive gaming is hugely popular in South Korea. It hasn’t caught on to quite the same extent among China’s millions of gamers, but it is growing. So much so, in fact, that on Tuesday Netease held a special press conference featuring famous Chinese gamers Sky and Miss as well as European champion Grubby to announce the company’s new strategic initiative to push competitive gaming in China. Together with the General Administration of Sport of China (yes, that sounds awkward as hell but that’s its official name) and the CESPC, Netease will be pushing to make China’s competitive gaming sector healthier, more industrialized, and more sustainable.

Of course, in doing so, Netease is also helping itself. The company is the official operator for Blizzard games like Starcraft 2, which are hugely popular among competitive gamers. DOTA-like games are also hugely popular in the e-sports arena, and not coincidentally, Netease will be releasing its own DOTA clone called Heroes of the Three Kingdoms next week. Netease is likely hoping that with the help of government organizations like the General Administration of Sport of China, it can establish Heroes of the Three Kingdoms as the DOTA game of choice for domestic gaming competitions.

In fact, Tuesday’s press conference seems to have been used in part as a promotional event for Heroes of the Three Kingdoms, with time devoted set aside for the game developers to talk about the game and the development process. It sounds interesting, and I’ll hopefully be taking a closer look at it next week, but all the self-promotion makes it a little hard to take Netease’s rhetoric about helping domestic e-sports all that seriously.

The bigger question, though, is to what extent competitive gaming can really catch on in China. As of now, it certainly hasn’t managed to capture anything approaching a mainstream audience, but it also hasn’t been promoted that heavily outside of a few niches. Could e-sports ever rival the popularity of (forgive me) real sports like soccer or basketball in China? Personally, I’m pretty skeptical, but stranger things have happened. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

(via Netease Games)