As the e-sports industry continues to boom in Asia, the trio behind Cyber Games Arena, Asia’s largest e-sports complex, talk about what the future holds for this groundbreaking industry
“Team East is surrounded. It’s three versus five and Insec’s assist comes a bit too late. Wait—oh my God—they just fought back with a triple kill,” the commentator gasped.
Some 5,000 spectators inside Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre cheered. Ten players, mostly in their 20s, sat in professional gaming chairs on stage. Their eyes fixated on their monitors, fingers rapidly dancing on mice and keyboards. It was “League of Legends – Return of The Legends Invitational,” an e-sports tournament featuring retired all-star gamers, at last year’s E-sports and Music Festival in Hong Kong, the biggest e-sports event in Hong Kong.
The three-day festival attracted more than 150 gamers worldwide, 80,000 visitors and an estimated online viewership of 12 million worldwide. “It was the second year we organised the tournament and the festival zone for the Hong Kong Tourism Board,” says Kurt Li, the 32-year-old co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Cyber Games Arena. “When we debuted ‘Return of the Legends’ in 2017, it immediately became a hot topic [in the e-sports community] as it was the first of its kind in the world.” The ticketed tournament ended five hours later with a final score 3:2. All three tournaments during the festival were sold-out.
Founded in 2013, Cyber Games Arena is now one of the biggest e-sports event organisers in Hong Kong and Taiwan—but it started as a failed school project.
“Ryan Chow, Sam Wan and I were fanatic gamers when we were young. It wasn’t coined as e-sports then. We’d go to one internet café after another to compete with everyone—and we would always win,” says Li. In 2003, the trio won Rainbow Six’s Asia Championship. “The prize was only about $20k for the entire team but it meant the world to us. My mother, who was very against gaming, said to me, ‘Don’t do anything illegal, son.’ She couldn’t believe I could make money from playing games.”
They then moved to study in different countries, but online games had kept them together. While e-meeting in one of the online gaming sessions, Wan asked his two friends to help brainstorm a business idea for his final-year project. An 80-page e-sports business proposal was born at the end of the night. “The professor failed Sam, saying he couldn’t see it as a solid business. He said it was child’s play,” laughs Li.
Upon returning to Hong Kong in 2010, the trio founded a digital marketing company. But wasn’t until Kurtis “Toyz” Lau, a pro-gamer in Hong Kong, surprised the city by winning the League of Legends World Champion Season 2—and US$1 million prize money—with his Taipei Assasins teammates that they remembered their dusty final-year project.