For the past few days, I've spent a lot of my time watching Chinese Dota streams. Since I live in New Zealand, the streams do lag from time to time, but overall the experience had been an interesting departure from what you'd expect from Twitch. So in this post, I'll talk a bit about Dota 2 streaming in China, and a bit about the Chinese Dota scene in general.

Douyu is basically a Twitch knock-off...with 10 times the viewers

In the West, Twitch has almost established a monopoly over the streaming market. No other streaming site comes close to matching its popularity. In China, things are a bit more complicated. Several streaming sites, all of which are modelled after Twitch, compete for China's gigantic market. Right now, China's 'Big Four' streaming sites are Douyu, Huomao, Zhanqi and Huya. Douyu is arguably the most popular out of the four, although after a series of recent contract signings Huya may have come up on top.

BurNing's digital apparel Taobao store

China's Dota streamers have several ways of generating income. First, there's the money they get from signing contracts with the streaming sites. Well-known players, such as ZSMJ and longdd, can receive several million Yuan in advance, which makes streaming a very lucrative career. Players like YYF (part of the iG team that won TI2) have made more money streaming Dota post-retirement than during their professional careers. Back in Dota 1 days, professional Dota players were paid with tiny salaries. In 2011, a mere sum of 60k Yuan was enough to convince BurNing to quit EHOME and join DK. It only took three years for professional Dota players, like BurNing, to become millionaires.

On Twitch, streamers generate revenue mainly through signing up Twitch partnerships and playing ads. China's Dota streams also have ads, except they are advertisements of the streamers' Taobao shops. Taobao is essentially a Chinese version of Ebay, selling everything from snacks, gaming mice to clothing. Opening Taobao shops have become a popular way for retired Chinese Dota players to make a living off their fanbase, so it's no surprise their ads lead straight to their own stores. Besides that, however, you won't see ads for the new WoW expansion during a Chinese stream. Third-party advertisements are kept to a minimum.

Besides advance payments and Taobao shops, stream sites have also set up reward systems that pays bonuses for streamers according to their popularity. Douyu, for example, has a feature where you can gift a type of currency called 'Yuwan' to players of your choosing (Douyu or 斗鱼 literally means 'Fish Fighting', hence Yuwan or 鱼丸 means 'Fishball'). Player popularity is assessed according to the amount of 'Yuwan' they have, and bonuses are paid out accordingly. This system is somewhat similar to the donation boxes of Twitch streamers, except that money is administered centrally by the streaming sites themselves.

Ferrari's Douyu stream, with the 'Yuwan' spam on the right

In terms of raw numbers, China's streaming audience is enormous. On Twitch, popular streamers like Singsing may attract somewhere around 20 to 25k people. Slightly less popular streamers, like Merlini, may receive around 7k to 8k. In China, streamers such as YYF receive up to 400k viewers. Ferrari's viewership averages around 200k. Even the less popular streamers from tier 2 teams can consistently attract 10 to 15k viewers. Obviously, viewer count is as polarized in China as it is on Twitch. The vast majority of viewers are concentrated in a tiny group of famous Dota players, many of whom have already retired (with Zhou, longdd and xiao8 being the most popular). Even if you have 6k mmr, your stream is unlikely to attract more than a few hundred viewers...

Unless you are attractive. Like Twitch, China also has its share of female streamers. Like their Twitch counterpart, they are usually young, attractive and have facecams bigger than the actual gameplay. Unlike Twitch's female streamers, China's streaming sites actively encourage female streamers to dress up, cosplay and market themselves to China's male gamers. Huya, for example, has a section devoted exclusively for the female streamers. China's most famous female Dota 2 streamer is probably 冷冷 (or ''Cold Cold'), who also provided Chinese commentary for the annual TI tournaments. Unsurprisingly, she also has her share of drama in the Chinese Dota 2 community, but that's a story for another time.

In stark contrast to viewership numbers, China's stream chat is surprisingly well-behaved. Twitch chat is, of course, well-known for its spam and memes (can you imagine the state of Singsing's chat with 400k viewers?). Twitch chat is also thoroughly unproductive, unless it's on subscriber mode. To be sure, China's stream chat also features its share of memes, but the chat is mostly quite productive. Even on a stream as populated as YYF's, you can still see discussions over item builds, in-game decision-making, and of course a lot of flaming. Whereas on Twitch, you'd expect a wall of Kappa, BibleThump and lots of copypasta. Copypasta, by and large, don't exist in China. While personally this makes for a better experience, Chinese streams are admittedly less funnier without the emotes and the spam. But that's up to personal preference.

Some concluding thoughts

What makes streaming Dota so lucrative has to do with competition between streaming sites, and the huge fanbases popular streamers have behind their backs. Obviously, streaming sites are operating at a loss when they pay out millions of dollars to streamers who can jump to another site if a more lucrative contract is offered. With increasing competition from LoL and other cheap MOBA knock-offs, Dota may lose popularity and with that, Dota 2 streams will become less lucrative. And with more and more pro players entering the market, there'd be increasing competition not just between stream sites but also between players. Chances are that the insane rate of growth that we are seeing now will die out very, very quickly, and the most money will, like always, go to the least number of people.