Students in a gaming league of their own

A college student plays video games at an e-sports bar during his summer vacation in Qingdao, Shandong province. Yu Fangping / For China Daily

If you think only e-commerce and love go cross-border these days, think again. Gu Qiyun knows better. She is busy making preparations for a cross-border gaming tournament.

Gu, chief operating officer of LanYou Culture, a major e-sports business operator in China, said the Shanghai-based company will launch the first-ever e-sports theme carnival at colleges in eight countries in the coming autumn.

The move to lure college e-sports fans is the firm's latest effort to stand out in an increasingly competitive gaming market in China.

"Many companies are holding various e-sports competitions that target college-going game players. So, we think we need to offer more than e-sports. In these carnivals, we will bring an entertainment feast to college students, in the form of rock bands, cosplay contests and flea markets," she said.

LanYou, whose businesses span from China's leading e-sports club Newbee to production of e-sports television shows, is one of the country's earliest organizers of national-level e-sports competitions for colleges and the first to take such events to markets outside China.

Over 1,000 of China's 2,800-odd colleges have e-sports teams or clubs founded by students, said Lu Hongbing, chief operating officer of 7FGame, an online gaming service provider.

"And our survey showed that over 60 percent of China's 36 million students have more or less played e-sports," he had said in a previous speech.

Since 2015, LanYou has been organizing a college-level e-sports tournament every six months. The most recent edition ended in July and attracted over 50,000 college students worldwide, who battled for the prize money of 2 million yuan ($301,159).

Gu said college students don't directly spend a lot of money on e-sports because many of them don't make money on their own yet, though some of them do hold various part-time jobs.

"But they are the bottom of the e-sports pyramid and they have the potential to become big-spenders on e-sports in future. No company can afford to ignore them. Ignoring them would mean losing them," she said.

Heavy investments in gaming by internet giants such as Tencent Holdings Ltd are increasing the number of advertisers who want to reach their target audience via e-sports. Consequently, the prize money in e-sports competitions, too, is becoming bigger and bigger.

Gu said LanYou's forthcoming e-sports tournament may yet end up "burning money", commercially speaking. But she is confident reaching the break-even point may not be an impossible task, given that it's a global event. "We've already landed a lot of sponsors for the event, mostly makers of fast moving consumer goods and auto makers."

The college e-sports tournaments' popularity has impressed China's General Administration of Sport so much that it has bestowed official recognition on e-sports, which are now the 99th sporting discipline in China.

The administration has even set up the China Universities E-sports League earlier this year, trying to use non-commercial e-sports tournaments to guide the industry towards healthier development.

This could mean college students cannot put gaming on top of their studies; participants cannot fail in any of their courses; and winners are likely to be rewarded by way of scholarships rather than cash, said Kenneth Chang, deputy secretary of the organizing committee of the China Universities E-Sports League.