Beyond the LPL, How China Is Redefining Its Esports Model

For a lot of Western fans, China is considered the home of high-mechanics and scrappy fights when it comes to League of Legends. The region took the spotlight back in 2018 when Invictus Gaming surprised everyone to lift the Summoner’s Cup, becoming the first-ever LPL team to win Worlds. This milestone accelerated the dynamic and the enthusiasm for the ecosystem. That momentum fed an era of explosive growth: talent pipelines, major investments, and large venues.

This didn’t just extend to the MOBA title. Over the past decade, the Chinese market has helped define what modern esports looks like. While Korea is known for its elite talents and infrastructure, the Chinese esports industry has increased the benchmark for commercial scale, building ecosystems designed to turn the esports spectacle into mass entertainment, both online and offline.

The LPL has multiple dedicated broadcast venues in the country (Shanghai, Suzhou, Shenzhen, Xi’an, Beijing) and has “invaded” Chengdu for both the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational and the League of Legends World Championship 2025. The other flagship esports title, Honor of Kings’ KPL, had the competition take place across Chengdu, Changsha, and Beijing, including a record-breaking final event at a former Olympic stadium.

It influenced how leagues are structured across the globe, how media rights and platforms monetize content, and most importantly, how esports can be crossed over with other sectors, creating new revenue opportunities and visibility beyond the core fanbase. Several global brands, such as apparel brand Mercedes-Benz and Nike had joined the LPL on multi-year deals back in 2018 and 2019, respectively. A few years later, KPL still had a similar structure when it came to signing brands, with a total of 15 brands in the latest 2025 season. In terms of media rights, the exclusive domestic broadcasting rights for Worlds between 2020 and 2022 were worth RMB 800 million (€103 million), according to Reuters.

That said, China is shifting towards a new era. While the numbers appear to post yet another strong year of consistent results, the priorities seem to be changing, especially when it comes to the LPL. The league is progressively losing interest from its audience, and the rise of other game titles has made it even more challenging for it to keep up.

So, how is the Chinese esports sector shaping up what could be the trend moving forward? Here is our snapshot of its ecosystem, using the official numbers provided by the ESC (电竞工委, Esports Working Committee) of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association (CAPDA), as well as considerations from experts on the subject matter.

Following a decrease between 2021 and 2023, the total revenues generated from the Chinese market have been growing at a steady rate year-on-year (YoY). According to the report, the revenue in 2025 amounted to RMB 29.331 billion (€3.56 billion), increasing by 6.4% compared to the previous year.

The revenue mix has also stayed consistent, with more than 4/5 of it coming from live streaming and content. The remaining 20% is composed of tournament and event revenues (8.65%), club revenues (6.38%), and other revenues (4.16%).

The esports audience has also seen a small increase, with the total number reaching 495 million (+1.06%), roughly an additional five million users. Overall, it appears that the ecosystem remains stable in its current state. That said, the entire structure is undergoing a major transformation that will likely shape the upcoming five to ten years of the industry.

Even though the total numbers have been consistent over the past years, the esports player base is undergoing a shift. Shooter games have increased by 2% compared to 2024, reaching a total of 28.3%, while MOBA titles have decreased from 15.2% to 14.1%.

This means that while MOBAs like League of Legends and Honor of Kings are still pillars in the ecosystem, the Chinese audience is also diversifying away, with an increasing popularity from games such as VALORANT — the Chinese team EDward Gaming even won the Champions, world VALORANT championship, in 2024 —, Peacekeeper Elite (Chinese version of PUBG Mobile), and Delta Force, on top of the more traditional shooter titles such as Counter-Strike and CrossFire.

As an example, Peacekeeper Elite had reached a DAU (daily active users) of over 33 million last year in August, signaling a strong player base that feeds into the elite competitive circuit. The Peacekeeper Elite League (PEL) 2026 Spring split sees a total of 22 teams competing for a major prize pool of RMB 16.4 million (€2 million).

While League of Legends is still one of the competitive reference points for China internationally, it’s also where some of the ecosystem’s biggest pressure points are showing. Interest in the LPL has cooled compared to its peak years, and that has had major financial consequences: with lower viewership, sponsorship revenue becomes harder to generate.

Part of this is simply the success of other titles. China’s attention has fragmented across mobile ecosystems and the growing FPS pipeline, so League is no longer at the center of attention. The decreasing interest, however, is also tied to results: the LPL’s last Worlds title was EDward Gaming back in 2021, and since then, the region has never been able to lift the Summoner’s Cup again.

For many Chinese fans, international sporting success carries nationalist weight, says Emmanuel Lincot, Professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris and a specialist in contemporary China’s political and cultural history. “Any phenomenon of this kind becomes magnified when there is an international encounter [creating] national cohesion. The regime has every interest in channeling and appropriating these nationalist sentiments.”

Chinese fans view international results way above just bragging rights. Professor Lincot explained it as a three-layer phenomenon. First, an economic dimension: excelling in esports is also a signal of control over one of the “key industries of the future,” video games. Second, a nationalist dimension that mirrors older sporting rivalries. “Beyond the game itself, it is a way of reconnecting with historical memory. In East Asia, there may be a Confucian tropism: one inherits a cultural legacy, and past wrongs are transmitted across generations. There is a kind of memorial obligation,” explained Lincot.

The Professor also argues there is a third layer that is easy to miss from the outside: a desire to project a discourse through games themselves, one that can align with state narratives and is closely watched internationally. In this reading, esports isn’t just entertainment or even just an industry—it can become a soft-power tool, and occasionally a politically sensitive one. This is why competitive success matters so much in this country.

In the past years, several teams like Bilibili Gaming (BLG) and JD Gaming (JDG) have tried to assemble superteams, but those attempts didn’t end up working out, with Korea coming out on top in the past four world championships. To top it all off, according to the report, players’ salaries weren’t reduced at this time, with some of the top players even earning close to RMB 30 million (€3.65m) annually.

Lincot argues that once a player is “proven,” especially on the international stage, they don’t just draw a paycheck: they anchor an entire derivative economy built on content and fan spending, reflecting how value is created in contemporary digital culture.

While the flywheel worked when the interest was high during international success, the consequences in recent years have been brutal: costs were still locked, but the lower monetization progressively widened the gap between what teams spend and what the ecosystem generated.

As a result, Chinese League of Legends has entered a major restructuring phase. The LPL introduced stricter salary caps on players to control spending, but teams like FunPlus Phoenix and the iconic Royal Never Give Up have also quit the league, with the latter even facing debts and legal disputes. Teams are not the only ones affected: the league has lost out on major sponsors at the end of 2025 (Mercedes-Benz, OPPO, Intel, and Momchilovtsi), which will likely impact revenues in the coming years.

Currently, the teams best positioned to ride out this transition are going to be those with strong backing by major conglomerates or platform groups that treat esports less as a standalone business entity but more as a long-term brand asset and a way to strengthen their digital presence, such as BLG, Weibo Gaming, and JDG.

The only exception among the top teams in the LPL seems to be Anyone’s Legend, which is a part of All Gamers (AG) Esports Club. Founded in 1999, the Chengdu-based squad has been competing across several game titles over the past decades and has been achieving great competitive results across League of Legends, including a second-place at the Esports World Cup 2025 and close to beating world champions T1 at Worlds a few months later. That said, the team’s biggest success comes from its other flagship roster, Honor of Kings (HoK).

Many might not know how popular the HoK esports scene has become in the country. According to a league’s report, it had already recorded a peak viewership of 240 million people back in 2018. Last November, the league’s Grand Finals drew 62,196 spectators at Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest, setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest audience at an esports match.

This makes the scene extremely appealing to teams, who can count on a large reach for commercial opportunities and eye-watering prize pools (KPL 2025 Finals had a combined RMB 70 million prize pool, around €9.8 million), but most importantly, the tournament organizer.

In a podcast with Chen-WenJian from Esports Business Review (电竞产业独立 论), Xiao Ma from People’s Esports (人民电竞) also revealed that the KPL, which is run by Hero Esports, surpassed RMB 100 million (€12.214 million) in ticket revenues in 2025, with over 330,000 people attending live.

Even though the numbers seem to suggest a dominance of the mobile esports scene in the country, Ma has a different opinion: “I don’t think it’s accurate to say things will keep leaning toward mobile. The main real success story in mobile esports is still KPL, which has developed a pretty successful fandom culture. That said, the social/offline/cultural combination has also been achieved in VALORANT, so it doesn’t really differ just because something is PC or mobile.”

Speaking of VALORANT, Riot Games has seemingly found its formula for the flagship FPS title. For 2026, VCT China (CN) has planned out a ‘7-city tour’, with the domestic league splitting the competitive calendar across five cities (Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Beijing, Changsha, and Chengdu), in addition to VCT Champions in Shanghai and the year-end Radiant Invitational (hosting city yet to be announced).

Unlike the LEC Roadtrips in EMEA, which usually last one or two days, the league stays for longer periods in the chosen cities, allowing the league to partner up with the cities’ local governments while also making city-wide activations that go beyond just the pure esports viewing experience. The result is that the host city isn’t just providing a venue; it becomes part of the product, with fans contributing to the local economies.

The local governments have also been part of the process through economic contributions. Back in 2024, Chengdu was reportedly offering an allowance of up to RMB 5 million (around €610,000) to tournament organizers that had international esports events in the city. Chengdu has been, aside from Shanghai, the preferred destination for hosting live esports events, with Chongqing rising as a new hub in 2025.

This desire of several cities across the country to establish themselves on the global esports map is also said to stem from domestic political considerations within the country, according to Emmanuel Lincot: “This has been common practice throughout China’s long history, dating back to imperial times. The farther you are from the capital, Beijing, the more room you have to assert yourself. The city that appears eager to claim the leading role is Shanghai. Traditionally, Shanghai is the direct rival of the northern city—Beijing.”

All of this feeds into the bigger direction the Chinese market keeps doubling down on: Esports and Game Integration. The competitive scene has become a growth lever — a way to push the IP. “This [model] meets both publishers’ marketing needs and helps esports reach more mainstream audiences, while also becoming a cultural-tourism highlight that local governments are willing to support. This is something quite unique to China,” explained Ma.

While esports remains a core, it’s supported by publisher-led activations and city-level involvement, creating a loop where the game draws attendance, and the attendance drives tourism and consumption, with surrounding experiences constantly keeping the audience tied to the ecosystem. Ultimately, this gives both sponsors and the tournament organizer more ways to monetize beyond the competition itself.

“The biggest difference between China and international esports right now is that, while both are publisher-led, China has more publishers and a bigger games market, so there’s stronger publisher support as well as backing from different levels of [the] government since culture/tourism is a trendy policy focus. Moreover, China doesn’t have betting, another key difference compared to the Western market," added Ma.

Based on how things stand, the future is not looking bright for the game in China. The LPL will still need time to recover from this period, and there’s no quick fix that will suddenly bring the league back to its peak. If anything, League of Legends has to re-earn attention in a market where audiences have more choices, and the new generations are growing up with different games and communities.

Moreover, China’s regulatory stance on youth gaming also adds extra layers of complexity in trying to attract new fans. Since September 2021, the country has limited minors to just one hour of online gaming on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays, restricted to 8–9 p.m., alongside stricter real-name verification and anti-addiction enforcement requirements for game companies.

These are all factors that can further slow the “natural” pipeline from casual play into long-term fandom for any legacy esport, including League of Legends, and it appears to be at odds with China’s ambition to assert itself as a global leader in this industry. “China’s participation in esports is becoming increasingly institutionalized. As is often the case in China, there is a clear intention to instrumentalize and appropriate a practice that has already existed for several years. What is particularly striking is the schizophrenia—or rather the separation—between, on the one hand, a coercive domestic policy restricting video games internally, and on the other, the promotion of China’s soft power capabilities abroad,” Emmanuel Lincot says.

That likely means finding new ways to make the product feel essential again—either through a return to international dominance that restores prestige, or through a more innovative approach that modernises how the product is packaged and closer to the “esports + cultural entertainment” direction mentioned earlier.