When Li Peinan reached the top of the "StarCraft 2" project in the 2023 IEM Katowice finals, the four words "StarCraft" once again evoked the memories of countless players in China.
As one of the "veterans" of e-sports in China and even the world, StarCraft has long withdrawn from the ranks of mainstream esports, but this does not prevent it from always having many fans. It's just that when Li Peinan won the first StarCraft world championship in 25 years for China, the Chinese professional interstellar field, and even this series of products that accompanied the development of China's e-sports, had entered the "end of the world".
1998-2008: The decade of Star 1, the exploration period of Chinese esports
When Blizzard launched StarCraft in 1998, the concept of esports was only a vague prototype in the world. In the early days, the so-called e-sports were more of some offline game matchups. The advent of "StarCraft" coincided with the early development of the Internet, and "StarCraft" also became one of the "veterans" of e-sports.
StarCraft got off to a good start in Europe, the United States and South Korea, especially when the Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA) was established in 2000.
According to the data of the "esportsearnings" website, in 1998, there were only four esports projects in 1998: "Quake 2", "Thor World", "StarCraft: Brood War" and "Age of Empires", and there were only 10 events in total. Among them, there is only one event in the interstellar event, and there are only 8 players, and there are no Korean players. But after two years of development, in the data of 2000, South Korean players can almost be regarded as monopolizing interstellar projects, and only a few European and American players can still appear on the prize money list.
In the two years when "StarCraft" was just released, almost all large and small Internet cafes in China were occupied by this game, until "CS" became popular in China in 2001, and later "Legend" appeared, which gradually diverted the number of users of Interstellar. "StarCraft" and "CS" were also the two most mainstream e-sports sports at that time, the former almost became the "national skill" of South Korea, and the latter was the favorite of European and American players. But in China, there are only a handful of esports players.
What really brought interstellar or e-sports into the public's field of vision should be a program of "E-sports World" produced by CCTV in 2003, including names such as Luo Xian, PJ, F91, etc., which were gradually known by interstellar fans.
"In fact, it was just a hobby at that time, as for professional players, there was not much concept", as one of the earliest interstellar professional players in China, Sun Yifeng (ID: F91) recalled that when he became an interstellar player, the concept of e-sports was still very vague in China, and "playing games can make money" is beyond most people's cognition.
Unlike South Korea's already large-scale e-sports industry, China's public opinion at that time was more torn between the concepts of "e-sports" and "games", and the majority was naturally the latter. A small number of professional esports players are also because of their hobby, "generating electricity with love".
It was the definition of esports at that time that made it connect with traditional sports for the first time. "Actually, I didn't really care about this, but many people in the esports industry at that time still valued it." Huang Xudong is an early e-sports practitioner in China, from the beginning of college to write battle reports for e-sports events, to join NeoTV after graduation, do event operation and commentary, his main project is "StarCraft".
In Huang Xudong's view, e-sports is a project full of potential, and the e-sports industry should have confidence and self-improvement. The early hope of linking with traditional sports is also a helpless move, only by doing so can we promote the development of e-sports in China faster. However, in the era of post-50s and post-60s parents, even traditional sports were still arguing about whether Ding Junhui should abandon his studies and focus on snooker projects, let alone "game" cognition such as e-sports. Therefore, e-sports and sports, e-sports entry into the Olympic Games, etc., have not been substantially promoted.
Even so, esports has ushered in an unstoppable development in China. Sporadic e-sports clubs have been established, and there are also some broadcast agencies such as PLU, NeoTV, GTV, Game Fengyun, etc., which use the gradually formed Internet and Gehua Cable and other platforms to make e-sports truly a project with a large audience in China.
But under the rapid development, "StarCraft" has been under a lot of pressure. When CS entered the country not long ago, Blizzard did not stop developing, and they launched "Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne" in 2002. Compared with the previous version, Warcraft 3 is more well-made, capturing a large number of players at once, and some interstellar players have also switched to the Warcraft project, including some professional players. StarCraft's "territory" has been continuously eroded under the dual effects of the emergence of new games and the rapid development of the Internet.
In 2008, the tenth year of StarCraft's release, the foundation of domestic players is still there, but due to the unsatisfactory results of professional players and the impact of many online games, WCG has prepared to cancel StarCraft's division in China and retain only one Chinese finals. At that time, under Huang Xudong's efforts, the five divisions of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Chengdu and Guangzhou were finally retained. With the interstellar heritage in China, the effect is still good, which also allows the interstellar project to recover nearly half of the competition area in the following year.
However, this is only a forced continuation of "StarCraft", after all, "Warcraft" has the blessing of Li Xiaofeng (ID: SKY) world champion halo, and as Sun Yifeng sighed, the gap between Chinese professional stars at that time was already irreversible. What's more, at that time, the global "StarCraft" project had also gone downhill.
2008-2012: Interstellar iteration makes strategic mistakes, MOBA games hit strongly
As a Blizzard company that has successively produced "StarCraft" and "Warcraft", as well as the explosive "World of Warcraft", it already had the feeling of being a leader in the game industry and even in the field of e-sports. They naturally won't sit and wait for their products to be eliminated, and StarCraft 2 is also completed at this time.
The 2008 Blizzard Global Invitational was held in Paris, and Chinese professional star player Sun Yifeng was invited to participate. At the game site, he saw the beta version of StarCraft 2 for the first time. Sun Yifeng said: "At that time, I felt that this game was still relatively friendly to Star 1 players, many places were connected, and I wanted to try it again." ”
But when StarCraft 2 was officially released in 2010, Blizzard's focus was still in South Korea, after all, with the success of Star 1, they hope to replicate the miracle in Korea. As a result, Blizzard invested heavily in building the GSL league in South Korea, with more than ten games a year, and the championship prize money for each match was as high as $100,000.
However, Blizzard's spending in South Korea did not achieve the desired effect, and their desire to cooperate with KeSPA in a new model became one of the main factors why Star 2 did not get promoted in Korea.
A player like Sun Yifeng who has the courage to switch from Star 1 to Star 2 actually has a lot of courage, especially since he was 25 years old at the time, which is not young among professional esports players. And a large number of Star 1 players in South Korea, on the one hand, is the problem of age, on the other hand, they have achieved great success in Star 1, and it is a big question whether they can regain their glory when they switch to the Star 2 arena. Under the operation of KeSPA, Star 1 has a mature market in South Korea, and if Blizzard can reach a mutually acceptable cooperation model with KeSPA, KeSPA can even force Star 1 players to switch to Star 2. However, as the industry leader at that time, Blizzard's cooperation model was more powerful, which also led to the fact that Star 2 did not become a "national technology" like its previous generation.
In contrast, when Blizzard spent a lot of money in South Korea for Star 2, they only invested in some advertising in the Chinese market, and the attention was obviously not an order of magnitude. But even so, at that time, Huang Xudong had to passionately explain 8 hours of interstellar competition every day on NeoTV, five days a week. In the offseason, he also has to run WCG events across the country, and the intensity can be imagined. It can also be seen that even if Blizzard did not vigorously promote Star 2 in China at the beginning, it still has great expectations for people in the esports industry, especially those involved in interstellar projects.
And the two things that happened in China's e-sports circle at that time really made Blizzard set its sights on the Chinese market again.
The first thing is the Dota 2 project that was spun off from Blizzard, and the first TI event was held in Cologne, Germany, in 2011, when the championship prize was $1 million, which was once regarded by many as a scammer. As a result, the Ukrainian NaVi team won the championship, and the prize money was successfully cashed out, and the runner-up was the Ehome team from China, which also received a prize of $250,000, and the attention of Dota 2 and e-sports in China soared.
When the Chinese team IG won the second TI competition held in the United States in 2012, the Chinese e-sports industry "exploded". In addition to more young people seeing the prospects of e-sports, more manufacturers and capital have also seen the prosperous era of China's e-sports approaching. Blizzard is naturally among them.
The second thing came from the "League of Legends" project, which did not have much market at the time. Huang Xudong recalled that in 2010, Jin Yibo, the current CEO of Tengjing Sports, found them with a USB flash drive containing a League of Legends client compressed package, saying that this was a project they would focus on next, hoping to have a chance to show it at WCG. But the early League of Legends was somewhat like the first two versions of Warcraft, with average picture quality and not attractive.
Although during the WCG competition in South Korea in 2011, a performance booth of the League of Legends project was set up, but the booth of both interstellar and Warcraft was three layers inside and three layers outside, and under the huge booth of League of Legends, except for Korean or Chinese players on stage, there were some audiences, almost no one cared.
However, at the end of 2012, Yu Jingxi (ID: Misaya), as the captain of Team WE, won the IPL5 championship, becoming the first world champion of China's League of Legends project. League of Legends' data in the country began to soar, with 300,000 online soaring to 2 million.
Perhaps seeing the chemistry these two events brought to China's esports industry, the Blizzard Asian Championships and the World Championships were held at the Shanghai World Expo in October and November 2012. They hope to use such top events to attract Chinese players and save the market for Star 2. However, even if a single tournament is top-level, it is not as sticky to players as a continuation league, and the top tournament also reduces regional competitions to secondary or even lower levels.
2013-2017: China Star 2 missed two opportunities in a row
If Star 2 failed to reach the peak of Star 1 in South Korea, it is relatively speaking, in China, Star 2 is even more so.
In fact, the opportunity when I missed the StarHub 2 hairstyle and the World Championship did not have the expected effect, but Star 2 actually has a chance in China, whether it is at the level of esports or the level of players.
In 2014, live streaming platforms began to rise and capital settled in, allowing the esports industry to start another wave of acceleration mode. Huya Live Broadcast, Panda Live Broadcast, Douyu Live and other platforms have been born one after another, becoming a new output port for the e-sports industry, and also giving more e-sports practitioners a new way to "monetize". Many players, hosts, and anchors have obtained a high price, and it can be said that the live broadcast platform at that time was not bad money. In 2012, Huang Xudong, Sun Yifeng and Zhou Ning founded "Interstellar Old Boy", and with years of experience and love for interstellar, they also quickly gained a lot of fans. Huang Xudong once said that at that time, users of live broadcast platforms were still looking for projects to watch, and if they wanted to hold competitions, many platforms were willing to pay for them.
This is actually a great opportunity for Star 2. But at this time, Blizzard made another mistake, they wanted to copy the model of League of Legends LPL events.
In 2013, LPL held its inaugural competition in a "warehouse" in Taicang. According to Huang Xudong, at that time, the larger clubs in China did not have a branch of League of Legends, but the tournament party still worked diligently and attentively to this event, and finally achieved success.
Blizzard only saw the "monopoly" of LPL's organizers at the time and achieved success, but did not understand that they were helpless. Because there was no other platform in China to help League of Legends do this event. And Blizzard's status is different, there are too many platforms willing to do, but Blizzard wants to take the power into its own hands, causing Star 2 to miss the bonus period of the concentrated outbreak of the live broadcast platform.
Coupled with the fact that among professional players, no one has ever been able to appear a world champion like Warcraft, League of Legends and Dota 2, and Star 2 can only move forward silently in China.
In the following years, with the birth of "Honor of Kings", the territory and crowd coverage of China's e-sports industry became wider. Although the competition is more fierce, and on the one hand, Blizzard is focusing on supporting new projects such as "Hearthstone" and "Overwatch", on the other hand, it has gradually transformed back to the role of "game manufacturer". But at that time, after several years of operation, Interstellar 2 had more than 30 professional players in China, and the age group covered three generations of old, middle and young people, and Li Peinan was one of the younger generation.
Not only that, but the three generations of players are still quite competitive with each other, which is one of the important conditions for the development of competitive sports. But just when Star 2 practitioners and fans were expecting the results of this project, a fake match dealt a painful blow to China's Star 2.
Sun Yifeng and Huang Xudong were still heartbroken when they recalled the situation at that time. "If someone had achieved results at that time, Star 2 might have been another scene in China." Huang Xudong said that at that time, it should be regarded as the best era of China's Interstellar 2, the live broadcast platform is more mature, there are funds, there are many competitions and programs in China, and more than 30 players can also play. If it hadn't been for that fake game, maybe the results would have been played earlier. But that fake match led to the banning of 7 middle-generation players, and the talent was directly cut off, leaving only Li Peinan and a few other young players, which was almost "devastating" to the professional circle of China Interstellar 2.
Huang Xudong also gave an example. In 2018, Li Peinan defeated Germany's HeRoMaRinE 3-0 on the WCS Tour Montreal to reach the last four. At that time, it was not as broken as when he later won the championship, but everyone was very happy in the interstellar circle. But on that day, the number of simultaneous online users on the domestic server of Star 2 doubled from 100,000 to three or four hundred thousand, which made Blizzard China's people directly ask NetEase whether it did any activities, but it was actually just a top 4 result of Li Peinan. It can be seen that if it were not for the talent break in 2017, the Chinese interstellar players could have achieved results earlier, and the situation of interstellar 2 in China would be very different.
2018-2023: Li Peinan wrote a perfect ending
When on February 13, 2023, Li Peinan defeated South Korea's Maru at IEM Katowice and held the championship trophy high, I don't know how many interstellar players were in tears.
When the "Interstellar Old Boy" resumed in the live broadcast room the next day, the number of daily active users increased by nearly 5 times, and the number of online users in the live broadcast room reached 80,000 at the same time. Although StarCraft can only be regarded as a niche project in China today, the repercussions caused by Li Peinan's world championship have once again proved the status of StarCraft in Chinese esports.
However, only those who understand know that the current situation of China's professional interstellar is not optimistic.
Although China had two players, Li Peinan and Wu Yixi (ID: Coffee), participated in that competition, if you take pure professional players as the standard, China actually only has Li Peinan as a Star 2 professional player. "Although there are still some players in China who are playing Star 2, the vast majority of them are still taking care of live broadcast and other work, and only Li Peinan is the only one who purely trains and competes." Sun Yifeng said.
Li Peinan is "lonely" at some times. In the old club model, teammates trained together and could communicate. But today's Li Peinan can only practice more through confrontation with different players, which is basically online, isolated from the outside world and family every day, and practicing alone for 10 to 12 hours, Li Peinan's suffering is no less than any other e-sports player.
Fortunately, although squeezed by many e-sports projects, Star 2 now has a mature circle in China. In the professional astral circle, the early clubs no longer exist, and the team mode has been turned into a team model, and the players have moved from offline to online.
How much input does a team need? Sun Yifeng introduced that today's Interstellar 2 team is basically three players plus a team leader, and the average salary, plus the cost of 7788, is about 4.5 million yuan a year. The DPG team, which just won the fourth championship of the team competition not long ago, basically spends about 1.2 million yuan a year, which is already a top interstellar 2 team. "This amount of money is completely incomparable to League of Legends and Glory of Kings, and even a team has no player who is worth more. The operating expenses of the LPL team, 40 million is relatively saving. Sun Yifeng said that the bosses of today's Star 2 team are people who have feelings for Star 2 and do not expect this to make money. The Star 2 project is still affordable for individuals, but League of Legends and Honor of Kings can only be operated by capital.
As for team competitions like Star 2, Sun Yifeng said that they will hold two tournaments a year, each with an investment of 300,000 yuan, for a total of 600,000 yuan in the two sessions. In addition, some event packages and peripheral products will be sold online, such as a package that costs about 150 to 160 yuan and costs 299 yuan, so that selling 1,000 can have 300,000 income, and then invest 300,000 into team matches, as some bonuses for players, which is equivalent to spending 900,000 yuan a year for events. And like Li Peinan's T-shirt that won the championship, their Taobao store has sold more than 40,000 pieces, and the profits will also be distributed to the team, "Of course, the team does not need this money, the boss is more about feelings and friendship between everyone." ”
With Li Peinan's victory, many sponsors came to admire it, and this championship can be regarded as a "continuation of life" for China's interstellar. But this year, Li Peinan is 22 years old, and his final opponent, Maru, the top Star 2 player today, is also 27 years old, and they are already considered the "young people" among the Star 2 professional players, which shows that the Star 2 project is not only in China, but also faces the situation that professional players are about to break off in the world.
This is Star 2 and the former Star 1 and Warcraft, and even the current glamorous League of Legends, Glory of Kings, or has or will face the "lifespan" problem. But this is more for manufacturers to think about, and as players, tournament parties and players, what you can do more is to enjoy the joy and passion brought by e-sports projects in a limited time.
Sun Yifeng once said that in the 2012 WCG Warcraft 3 project in Kunshan, after the three- or four-place match between SKY and Moon, a song "Say Goodbye" sounded on the scene, which was shocking. That's not just for the two players, it's more like a happy ending for Warcraft 3. And this time, Li Peinan won the championship, why not write a Happy Ending for players and fans of China's Interstellar 2 professional circle and China's Interstellar series.