One week after Faker won the championship, people are still discussing him on Douyin.

Written by Lan Jie

Edited by Qiao Qian

1. There are many places to talk about emotions, but only on Douyin can one survive

At 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 2 local time, the final match of the 2024 League of Legends World Championship (referred to as "S14") was being live-streamed. Li Xiaolong, the founder of the game live-streaming guild Feijing Mutual Entertainment, and his colleagues were sitting in front of the screen, listening to the overwhelming cheers and witnessing the five-time championship of the South Korean e-sports star Faker.

Shortly after the game, "Faker's Fifth Championship" topped the Douyin hot list, with 3.209 million people watching. One week later, at 10 p.m. on another Saturday, the entry "Faker Once Suffered from Depression Due to Pressure" appeared on the Douyin hot list - discussions about Faker and this tournament are still ongoing on this platform and have considerable heat.

The game is over, but people's desire to explore does not stop abruptly, so the traffic begins to converge to various live-streaming and social platforms.

In this process, those top e-sports and game live-streamers who already have a huge fan base have consumed the majority of the traffic. Before 2023, these live-streamers mainly operated accounts on top live-streaming platforms such as Douyu and Huya. However, from the end of last year to this year, Douyin has frequently poached top live-streamers and well-known e-sports players from various platforms, including Xu Xu Baobao, Zhang Daxian, and Chen Ze, vigorously seizing this part of the traffic.

Li Jiujiu, a senior e-sports industry professional, informed 36Kr that when Douyin reached cooperation with live-streamers including Zhang Daxian, it did not give a guaranteed signing fee (referring to the one-time fee that the platform pays to sign a well-known live-streamer). In the e-sports industry, the signing fee that top live-streamers can get from Douyu and Huya can once reach the tens of millions.

But the live-streamers and players still chose to switch platforms. This is because the era of the e-sports industry spending money to snatch people is over, and also because Douyin's traffic is sufficiently attractive and has a rich variety of monetization forms.

Zhang Daxian was originally a top "Honor of Kings" live-streamer on Huya. On January 21 this year, Zhang Daxian officially started broadcasting "Honor of Kings" with the e-sports team XYG on Douyin. This live-streaming accumulated 47.197 million viewers, with over 1 billion likes and several million new fans. Such popularity is almost twice that of his peak period when he started broadcasting on Huya in 2019.

According to Li Xiaolong, compared to live-streaming on Huya and Douyu where monetization is almost solely dependent on rewards, Douyin has a much richer monetization path, including CPT (where the advertiser pays for a single collaboration), CPA (where the advertiser pays according to the number of clicks on the game link), CPS (where the advertiser pays according to sales volume), and gifts.

Douyin's huge traffic monetization ability even once attracted Faker, who earns a million-dollar annual salary. In June this year, Faker appeared in the Douyin live-streaming room of the official "League of Legends" in a connected manner to carry goods, mainly to promote his Hall of Fame skin. In the nearly 5-hour live-streaming, the overall sales reached 21 million yuan - on Douyin, Faker earned in five hours what he could earn in half a year.

Li Xiaolong, the founder of the game live-streaming guild Feijing Mutual Entertainment, also had to move from Huya to Douyin because he could no longer make money on Huya, but he could on Douyin.

2. Copyright is difficult to 攻克 (obtain), Douyin "takes an indirect approach to save the situation"

However, the business on Douyin has also encountered some other troubles.

During the S14 tournament, the traffic of more than one hundred Douyin live-streaming rooms under Li Xiaolong's guild decreased by one-third, "mainly due to the diversion of traffic to the official live-streaming room of the finals."

Douyin does not have the live-streaming copyright of S14 - copyright or IP is the most core competitive existence in the e-sports industry, and it has also been a pain point for Douyin's development of e-sports tournaments.

As early as when ByteDance acquired Mootong Technology in 2021, the outside world has already interpreted this move as an important layout of Douyin in the e-sports track. The flagship product of Mootong Technology, "Mobile Legends: Bang Bang", is the most popular MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) product in Southeast Asia, and the related e-sports tournaments around "Mobile Legends: Bang Bang" are also one of the most competitive e-sports tournaments in Southeast Asia.

However, ByteDance's game business came to an abrupt halt last year, and there were also rumors that Mootong Technology would be sold.

Tencent is a major owner of game copyrights. For a long time, the live-streaming copyrights of popular Tencent games such as "Honor of Kings" have not been released to Douyin. However, since the beginning of this year, ByteDance and Tencent have continued to break the ice, which has to some extent made up for Douyin's shortcoming in copyright. Of course, Tencent still has not released the e-sports tournament copyright of "Honor of Kings" to Douyin.

In January this year, the official Weibo of "Honor of Kings" posted that the Douyin live-streaming of the game will be fully open, and thus there was the later resurgence of Zhang Daxian. In the same month, the "Peace Elite" e-sports officially announced that the Peace Elite e-sports tournament will also be officially broadcast on Douyin. Since then, the two evergreen ace games under Tencent Games have been deeply connected with Douyin.

In addition, Tencent Games' 3A game "Delta Force: Xtreme 2", which received heavy investment this year, has been cultivating the relevant content ecosystem on Douyin three months before its launch on October 10, and has opened the live-streaming copyright of its global FPS (First-Person Shooter) All-Star Tournament to Douyin, once setting a record of over 60 million people watching at the same time.

The Chinese e-sports market already has a mature industrial chain, divided into the upstream represented by copyright and IP, the midstream represented by tournaments and teams, and the downstream represented by live-streaming and short videos. Douyin, which has solved the copyright problem to a certain extent, is also quickly attacking the midstream.

This year, Douyin has held many of its own e-sports tournaments: including but not limited to the PEL series tournaments in cooperation with Peace Elite e-sports in January this year; the CS e-sports tournament "Demon King Cup" jointly held with Perfect World e-sports in June this year; the "Daxian Cup Honor of Kings Invitational Tournament" jointly held with "Honor of Kings" and Zhang Daxian in July this year, etc.

And the e-sports ecosystem that Douyin has already cultivated will further enhance its strength in the downstream and even the midstream.

Li Xiaolong has now invested more than 2 million in the establishment of an e-sports academy because he believes that e-sports players who can win championships still have great commercial value. "The transfer fee of any KPL (Honor of Kings Pro League) professional player is more than 30 million."

But it is extremely difficult to become a professional player and depends on talent. Even some practitioners have stated in media reports that "the probability of a person becoming a professional player is one in 120,000", which is more difficult than the college entrance examination. Li Xiaolong also agrees with this statement.

Then what about the rest of the people? He said, they can be added to my live-streaming team.