China's 10,000 Gaming Talents
Charlotte Bullard is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS, where she focused on China and tech policy. She writes the Substack PandaMonium. In this article, Charlotte shows how China’s gaming industry is a microcosm of a recurring contradiction in Chinese policy: Beijing sets out to build national champions, then structurally hobbles them. The lesson more broadly is that Chinese policy is not a monolith — competing interests pull in different directions, and inefficiencies are inevitably introduced along the way.
This essay won one of seven Grand Prizes in the ChinaTalk Essay Contest.
On the eve of one of China’s greatest battles, the Chinese squadron of hardened experts had just lost their intrepid leader. Only weeks earlier, Zhang “Ning” (@xiao8) had stormed off the field and never returned. The remaining soldiers were weary, past their prime, and eventually overcome by their enemy after a misplaced maneuver. Xtreme Gaming had been the favorite to win the $1,000,000 prize on their home soil of Shanghai, and were expected to bring national honor. Instead, they fell at the group stage, defeated by another Chinese team, one that wouldn’t even make it to the playoffs. For the first time in history, not a single Chinese team made it to the playoffs in the August 2026 Dota 2 championship.
China usually has a national goal, increasingly one aimed at dominating a sector — controlling COVID, going green, and now advancing artificial intelligence. But the policies meant to achieve these goals tend to be ham-fisted, undermining the progress they were designed to produce. Track-and-trace COVID systems that gave local officials every reason to under-report; a green transition powered by new coal; crackdowns that gutted the country’s most innovative tech firms. Gaming is the latest case. Chinese state media reported that the 15th Five-Year Plan named the sector for the first time, as both a cultural export and a site of technological innovation, alongside AI, robotics, and wearable tech. By September, China’s National Press and Publishing Administration (国家新闻出版署) had formalized its recommendations to advance the export and dissemination of domestically produced games. Yet the humiliation at Dota 2’s world championship in Shanghai last month resulted from two decades of restriction: China is now trying to promote an industry it spent a generation suppressing.
China’s gaming regulations have always been fashioned as child welfare legislation. Curfews, real-name verification, facial-recognition patrols — techno-authoritarianism but for kids. But state solutions preferred not to touch the actual source of gaming addiction: the “gacha games” that encourage repetitive small-scale spending, or “microtransactions,”¹ to win randomized in-game rewards. Chinese in-app purchase revenue is expected to reach US$76 billion by 2030. Honor of Kings (HoK), China’s domestically produced multiplayer online battle arena game, has earned $10 billion from user spending since launch. Although there has been a decline in purchases of virtual goods that increase a player’s stats, a new market for purely cosmetic virtual goods is expanding. Some estimates put the cosmetic resale market cap for Counter-Strike 2 at US$6 billion.
HoK was built to maximize how much a player pays and not how long they play. As we’ll see later, the state came closest to regulating that mechanism directly through a December 2023 draft capping in-game spending, but withdrew the draft within a month under market pressure. Compared to the near-decade of tightening restrictions on minors. The asymmetry suggests the state’s revealed priority was never exclusively child welfare. Gaming regulation belongs instead to the same 2021 moment that disciplined Alibaba, Didi, and Ant Group, where Xi’s vision of “common prosperity” reminded capital, and the platforms that hold it, who is in charge. The cost of that campaign has fallen on the talent pipeline and a generation of e-sports players soon to be regulated out of existence.
“Who Killed Our Games?”
In the early 2000s gaming was taking center stage, with video game livestreaming and expanding national interest. But not all were enthused. In 2007, a game designer from Tencent, the world’s fourth most valuable internet company, penned an article entitled “Who Killed Our Games?” “谁谋杀了我们的游戏?” He lamented that lucrative gacha games “killed” off 75% of games in development, likening them to stillborn babies never given the chance to grow and mature.
“Is the gestation period too short? Is there not enough nutrition? Is it because the doctors performing C-sections are incompetent? Why can’t we ever deliver healthy babies (products) smoothly?
“是怀的时间不够长么？是营养跟不上么？是负责剖腹产手术的医生水平低劣么？为什么我们总是不能顺利生产出健康的宝宝（产品）呢？”
Under the handle “Yocar,” the author mourned this pattern. With the “bloodied” fetuses of games strewn around him, he and other developers began to dread the birth of their own games, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure to launch.² He wrote,
“…[We] have become professional physicians who study how to increase patients’ drug dependence and continuously improve purification processes; we have become professional agitators and weapons providers who encourage people to ignore the rules of reality, vent their personal emotions at will, and intensify various conflicts; we have become the bookmakers of underground casinos and the middlemen of various black market transactions. We became experienced game designers.”
Put more bluntly, “Making online games is like making opium.” The state would eventually adopt similar language, coining “spiritual opium” (精神鸦片) rather than “electric opium” (电子鸦片).³
The Drug Bust
Chinese regulation, like most, is monitored and enforced indirectly. In gaming, internet platforms have the opportunity to show fealty and cover their own interests at the same time. Where Western media platforms have safe harbor, Chinese ones may be held responsible for anything that emerges in or from their tech. Black Myth: Wukong, the AAA title discussed later in this piece, made headlines in 2024 when streamers given early access received strict guidelines from the marketing firm on what they could and could not discuss. They were specifically asked not to talk about the Chinese gaming industry and its regulations — which makes this very report all the more ironic. Counter-culture gamers, however, are not easily silenced, and were quick to share the “rules” with an unimpressed international audience. Even within gaming, honest opinions were carefully curated.
Chinese game developers had previously self-censored. After the launch of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, developers released a patch that made certain historically-based bosses unbeatable, protecting the Ming dynasty characters. The patch came after Chinese nationalist players review-bombed the game in defence of their historic heroes. Dota 2 has also self-censored its graphics for over a decade — in-game humanoid skeletons appear less bony and bloodied weapons are wiped clean.⁴ But self-censorship could not save gaming. Eventually, Economic Reference Daily (经济参考报) labeled gaming “spiritual opium.” Yes, opium, the drug that ushered in a century of humiliation and crushed a population weakened by a commercial interest. Tencent shares fell more than 10% intraday, wiping out roughly $60 billion in value. The piece vanished from the site that afternoon and returned with “opium” removed.
That summer, Beijing summoned gaming platforms to speak with authorities. Tencent developed a “midnight patrol” facial recognition system to stop children from working around real-name identification — capturing a user’s face and cross-referencing it against the registered account’s photo. If the faces didn’t match, the user was kicked off the platform. Tencent claims that the system only scans a face when the platform’s algorithms detect behavior, gaming patterns, and gaming time indicating a child is behind the screen.
Big Tech, Down for Maintenance
After the bulk of the tech crackdown, Beijing considered hitting gaming where it hurt the most: microtransactions. In December 2023, the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) published a draft guideline titled “Measures for the Administration of Online Games” that would limit spending in online games with spending caps. Tencent and NetEase’s values dived.⁵ A month later, the NPPA removed the draft regulations, and things returned to normal.⁶
China wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to take back control from Big Tech, which has gotten a little too big, even while relying on that same sector for consumer spending, soft power abroad, and national pride at home. This is a microcosm for Chinese policymaking writ large. There have been efforts since the early 2000s to mitigate gaming addiction, children’s playtime, and the general unproductive stereotype of gaming and gamers. But in 2021, that impulse converged with a broader reckoning aimed at business. Tencent, along with Meituan, ByteDance, and Alibaba, received a lashing in Beijing after being accused of monopolistic practices. In late 2020, Ant Group’s IPO was abruptly canceled, and Alibaba was later slapped with a roughly $2.8 billion antitrust fine. That summer, Beijing issued fines to various tech companies including Didi, whose planned IPO faced its own reckoning. The following months would see similar stories.⁷
Gaming regulation plays a similar role. Xi’s common prosperity campaign, launched in the same window, carried moral and spiritual aims to ban vices such as some online gaming, while condemning laziness and “welfarism” (福利主义). It included new restrictions on celebrities and fan culture, online gaming, and for-profit tutoring, all aimed at cleaning up the moral and spiritual media environment. Some analysts read the entire campaign as an effort to consolidate popular support through a largely superficial push against inequality that covered everything from private tutoring to online gaming.
10,000 Talents of E-sports
Yet e-sports itself has largely escaped this moral scrutiny. Xi’an Physical Education University intellectualized the distinction, citing China Central Television’s (CCTV) apparent turn back toward e-sports: the argument is that e-sports are turn-based, time-limited, and emphasize strategy — unlike the addictive, mindless mobile games the state has targeted. Regulators formalized the distinction in 2019, adding “e-sports player” and “e-sports operator” as recognized vocations. The same moral vocabulary that branded gaming a “spiritual opium” simultaneously carved out an exemption for the version of gaming legible as legitimate sport and legitimate career. This version, not coincidentally, was most useful to the state’s soft-power ambitions.
Subsequent regulations and crackdowns would lead to diminished talent in both players and designers. The biggest domestically produced hit, HoK, had stayed domestic. Chinese e-athletes were falling off the global stage. On the front lines of Dota, China’s star warriors have aged out of an IP that Chinese companies are licensed to operate, but not to own. Xtreme Gaming and Vici Gaming, two teams poised to perform well and key to China’s historical performance, have been doing so for a decade. Vici Gaming’s players last won the Dota tournament in 2016, and one of Xtreme Gaming’s soldiers had to come out of retirement just for the match. These men all had entire careers before Beijing cracked down on gaming. They are products of an environment the state tried to dismantle.
Multiple leagues faced roster shake-ups and season delays. Forty percent of Peacekeeper Elite League, another Tencent IP, was underage, and every club team had to reorganize before a postponed season. Chen Jiang (陈江), associate professor at Beijing University’s School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, told Reuters that “The new regulations almost kill young people’s chances of becoming professional e-sports players.” Most club teams don’t recruit until at least 17, which makes talent acquisition more expensive. Now, the average League of Legends professional in China is 20 or 21, which is the usual age for e-sports retirement.
Frankly, China wins the formats it owns. HoK is a Tencent title and a Tencent league, with Chinese teams facing no outside competition for the format’s talent or its championships. Dota 2 and League of Legends, however, are owned and hosted by Valve and Riot respectively, with Chinese teams competing against the rest of the world for both players and titles.⁸ Chinese teams are left competing on an uneven footing against international rosters that do not face the same restrictions at home.
A Thousand Troops, One Bridge
Even before “e-sports player” became an official vocation in 2019 and dozens of universities introduced gaming-related majors, e-sports academies had already sprouted up to train the next generation of hopefuls. Dream Wing E-Sports Academy (翼之梦电竞教育) in Chengdu, established in 2017, has a staff of retired pro gamers and a family counselor. Of the 700-plus e-sport hopefuls who passed through Dream Wing’s halls, two went pro. Everyone else needed emotional support when giving up the dream instead. Like a growing number of similar academies, Dream Wing doubles as a bootcamp that mimics the real life of an e-sports athlete with grueling gaming hours, strategy sessions, and cutthroat competition — for hopefuls who are, statistically, training for a career they will not get.
“Gaming Dissuasion Class” (游戏劝退班), a term coined by another e-sports academy in Shijiazhuang, has become a form of therapy. During school holidays, parents can pay a few thousand RMB for one week of “dissuasion,” or tens of thousands for an entire month. China News picked up on these schemes and encouraged parents to try talking to and understanding their kids instead, but many parents feel they have no choice.
These schools can likely operate gaming hours within the “vocational school” designation. But the future of gamers can only be produced in an artificial environment, and that environment lacks the hardware to support rigorous training. Ironically, schools will send their athletes-in-training back to the internet cafe, and gamers end up right back where they started.
Although there are a few vocational schools, and colleges now include many e-sport-related majors, experts aren’t convinced the next generation of e-athletes can survive the cull. Early evidence suggested minors’ playtime was not significantly impacted by the restrictions. Young gamers skirted regulations, used fake names, snuck into internet cafés, and did what kids do in general. But a study published this summer found that not only were minors’ gametime and online time decreasing, but so were those of their slightly older peers. If today’s youth aren’t gaming, and their slightly older friends aren’t either, who takes up the joystick next?
Sportsmen and Artists
Fifteen years after his 2007 essay, Yocar — real name Feng Ji (冯骥) — would go on to develop the smash hit AAA title Black Myth: Wukong. He had left Tencent’s Quantum Studio a few years after producing the gacha game Asura (斗战神), which early access reviewers found boring. Feng Ji left Tencent in 2014 and opened his own studio, Game Science, with the freedom to create the game that he wanted. In 2018, he and a handful of colleagues began developing Black Myth: Wukong, a single-player action role-playing game. By 2020, he declared Game Science would become the world’s leading action role-playing game (ARPG) developer and dropped a 13-minute trailer. Views hit 50 million; 1.2 million presale copies sold two days before the 2024 release; Chinese state media declared it a cultural hit. Xinhua wrote of “国风出海,” guofeng chuhai, “national style going out to sea.” The phrase deliberately echoed Jiang Zemin’s “Go Out” policy, launched in 2000 to send Chinese enterprises abroad in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis. This time, culture was the new export commodity.
Genshin Impact, another Chinese game that made waves overseas, was developed by miHoYo, a studio started in 2011 by a few Shanghai Jiao Tong University students in their dorm. They too relied on gacha mechanics to make money, and revenue from microtransactions reached over US$10 billion by the end of 2025, with half of players based overseas. The game won Best Mobile Game at the 2021 Game Awards and the 2024 Gamescom award. NetEase studio Everstone developed and published Where Winds Meet (燕云十六声), a wuxia ARPG that won Gamescom 2026’s Best Mobile Game award despite being cross-platform. Within six months of its global mobile release, the game made US$22.1 million in sales outside of China — US$8.6 million (9% of total sales) was from U.S. players alone.
These are the products of adults who were never subject to a curfew, an algorithmic age restriction, or a facial-recognition scanner. They certainly never had a tournament roster upended because a teammate turned out to be seventeen. The state’s two-decade campaign against gaming was built to catch children and control society. It never had to touch the people who make the games at all.
Game Over…?
Feng Ji had agreed with the state in condemning addictive gaming, but where the state cracked down on the player — through parents and platforms — Feng Ji condemned capitalism and the business model itself. Why does the state point to health rather than consumption? Probably because it needs consumption. It promotes the ecosystem for the sake of capital and business opportunity, unless capital becomes too powerful. It does not care that a player spends money on opium unless parents are upset and society looks precarious. As Feng Ji once wrote, it is a farce with “Chinese characteristics” (“典型中国特色”), where the government sets the stage and business is ready to sing and dance (“政府搭台，企业唱戏”). The state is simultaneously concerned for children’s welfare, addicted to gaming consumption, and hopeful for the next national champion. No single interest seems to win.
The Chinese gaming industry hit $51.8 billion in revenue last year, with annual revenue per player reaching $70. And while the children are restricted, China will face an e-sports talent deficit already visible in games like Dota 2 — one likely to spill into Chinese-owned IP as well, where a tiered development program cannot substitute for fresh, naturally grown talent. There is hope for more AAA Chinese games now that gaming has been identified as a cultural export. The state can only hope it doesn’t get in its own way again, as it did with e-sports.
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Formally referred to as 微交易, and colloquially called 氪金
This rhetoric was considered sexist by some and played into Yocar’s vulgar reputation; see this link.
“做网游就是做电子鸦片.”
Dota 2 enthusiast, Cyborgmatt, compiled competing Chinese and Western Dota 2 icons; see here for more.
See SCMP for a detailed timeline of the 2021 Big Tech crackdown.
Tencent owns Riot Games as of 2015.
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© 2026 Jordan Schneider
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