Chinese Hearthstone is a scene in a bubble as far as the competitive scene is concerned. The region operates under the overseeing eye of NetEase, Blizzard’s distributor for China, who also organize the major circuit of LAN tournaments which defines the landscape of the scene—the Gold Series. Even in the frame of the Hearthstone Championship Tour (HCT), Chinese Hearthstone operates under its own rules and there’s no comparison to the western scene. Its ladder seasons gives different points. Its seasonal championships are structured differently.

Due to language and internet barriers, few of what happens in Chinese Hearthstone is also broadcast in the west. The top players and streamers are enticed to stream on local platforms and don’t make their way west to Twitch or the likes. The ongoing majors such as the Gold Series or the Hearthstone Team Story (HTS), cannot be watched unless the viewers goes through a series of ordeals such as equipping VPNs or trying to load some of the Chinese streaming sites and hope it loads. Nobody makes the strenuous effort, and why would they? There’s plenty of Hearthstone in the west for the English speaking fan and he is content with the handful of China-hosted invitationals visited by western proplayers he knows: The so-called “Versus” championships or the likes of World Cyber Arena.

There are very few community members who serve as the bridge between the Chinese and western scenes, too, which bottlenecks the flow of information. One of those is Sinn Tann, a senior member of the Hearthstone scene and manager of Team Celestial, one of Hearthstone’s endemic and most successful Chinese teams.

And according to Tann, Chinese Hearthstone is in a whirlpool of changes like never before.

* * *

Team turmoil

China picked up Hearthstone early and by the mid-point of 2014 the country hard already developed an active scene. There were still no major circuit in place but with China being famous for the heaps of cash it had invested in the industry, it was a matter of time before the big players dipped their toe into CCG waters.

Between May and October of 2014, four of China’s esports giants ventured into Hearthstone: Invictus Gaming—the champions to take the $1M of Dota 2’s The International 2012—were the first, followed by World Elite, ViCi Gaming and Newbee, million-dollar franchises each. At the same time, the west was still in grassroots mode, operating with small endemic teams, all of which have now released their Hearthstone divisions or disbanded altogether.

In the eyes of the western fans, Chinese players were living the dream, but according to DreamHack champion and World Championship runner-up Xieyu “TiddlerCelestial” Wang, that wasn’t really the case.

“Most of the so-called Hearthstone pro teams in China are just one small section of the huge organization,” TiddlerCelestial told GosuGamers in June 2015. “They are irrelevant to the big picture. Their manager and leadership are not familiar with the Hearthstone scene. There are no team houses for HS players to live or practice in. The whole management is quite loose and casual. Because of the inconsistency in tournament results, many HS pros have no secure and steady income. In China, most income and sponsorship come from stream. The reality is, 90% of the Hearthstone related earnings are there only for streamers. Many pros were forced to turn to a streamer even though they didn’t want to.”

Image - DreamHack

Regardless, opportunities arose to support China’s competitive scene and give exposure to team franchises. In August 2014, the NetEase Esports League (NEL) was created to give room for teams to compete and became the first successful team league in Hearthstone. Between then and July of 2015, a total of four seasons NEL were held, essentially writing the success stories of teams such as Yolo Miracle, a roster which would later become a three-times team league champion. In September 2015, NEL was reformed into its spiritual successor the Hearthstone Team Story (HTS). The new HTS forsake the open qualifier aspect and employed a full-invitational format to only feature the big teams. Even though it increased it slots in subsequent seasons, the league remained skewed in favor of giants such as Edward Gaming, Newbee or OMG.

During the period between September 2015 and December 2016, the team league life proceeded as one would expect, with players hopping from team to team, retiring or switching to streaming and new players emerging on the scene. Shortly before last Christmas, however, things started falling apart and major orgs began abandoning Hearthstone.

The first one to say goodbye was OMG and not two weeks later. World Elite, too, followed suit. Before the fourth season of HTS could start, five more orgs would disband their Hearthstone rosters, including TongFu, NGA, StarHorn Royal, eStar and Celestial. The likes of Invictus Gaming—owned by the son of one of China’s richest businessmen—and Newbee kept their Hearthstone investment but nonetheless a big question needed answering: Was money leaving Chinese Hearthstone?

Challenged on the market

Competitive Hearthstone has always faced one major problem across all its scenes: Lack of reliability in tournament results. Even the best players in the world struggle to muster a win-rate above 60% and there is never even an ounce of guarantee that a top contender will go far in a tournament, as he can fall victim to the luck of the draw. Even in the West, many teams who have failed to grasp that concept and build their businesses around it were mismanaged into extinction.

Another notion expressed towards Hearthstone is that it’s not a truly competitive game. According to Celestial manager Sinn Tann, this notion is even more popular in China.

“The problem with Hearthstone in China is not just the esport scene but also the game itself. The Chinese fans think Hearthstone is no longer competitive, or even casual. they believe it’s not even an ideal free to play mobile game anymore.

Esports-wise, a lot of Chinese pros love to point out a misplay from tournament and make a great deal about it, but often times the bad players think they don't necessarily deserve a bad result and when that happens, they just start the meme and call Hearthstone a stupid luck game to justify their former statement.

Fans have seen this too often, so they truly believe the stupid luck game theory. That’s why Hearthstone is not considered as a true esport in China right now. And it’s also not casual. The reason being that Chinese players, no matter how skilled they are, tend to use the most effective deck to grind ladder and gold. Playing patches against patches ten games a day doesn't feel fun or casual.”

The cost of Hearthstone has also become a problem for the Chinese gamer, and it’s not so much about prices necessarily but what the player gets in return. Chinese players, Tann says, feel they are throwing away money spending on Hearthstone, as the cards are both too expensive and don’t automatically give you any privilege.

“It’s completely the opposite of what the Chinese are used to in other mobile games.”

The introduction of Standard and Wild also pissed off the Chinese gamers. The mentality in that part of the world is that once you purchase something, it will always belong to the buyer to do with it whatever he please. But Standard was seen as Blizzard taking cards away with no compensation.

And the Chinese players really hate that.

Sensing that complete dedication to Hearthstone might harm their business in the long run due to these reasons, NetEase themselves have been trying to peddle competitors to Hearthstone to cover more parts of the mobile market. Onmyoji, a NetEase-produced mobile game, reaped success and now Shadowverse—seen as one of the major direct competitors to Hearthstone even in the west—is also expected to make waves in China soon, and although it’s still far from the top of the CCG market, reports stated that it generated $100M in revenue in 2016, or a quarter of Hearthstone’s $395M despite launching halfway through the year.

Hearsthone’s struggles in mobile China in recent times have been well documented by several agents. According to a statistics collected by Newzoo, the last time Hearthstone was in the top 20 revenue-generating iOS games in China was in November 2016 and has since been dethroned by multiple games, many of which produced and distributed by NetEase themselves. In SuperData Research’s latest report, Hearthstone is said to have “marked its lowest point since releasing on both Android and iOS smartphones” with revenue going down “significantly year-over-year and month-over-month”.

As Hearthstone was designed to be casual first and competitive second, problems in the esports scene were only logical.

Present day shuffles and lights at the end of the tunnel

At the start of 2017, the Chinese competitive community was given the news that very few third party tournaments will be hosted this year, essentially establishing a competitive monopoly by NetEase and their Gold Series. Fewer opportunities would mean fewer paydays, especially considering how difficult it is to win a Gold Series open with thousands in attendance, so that became another incentive for big streamers to stream other games and leave Hearthstone on the bench.

A year ago, streaming Hearthstone’s competitors was frowned upon and could cost you slots in invitationals but NetEase has now chosen to be lenient instead. Streamers are once again free to explore other games besides Hearthstone with no consequences and many, including big ones like Zhang Ding a.k.a. Wangshifu, have picked up GWENT, a digital card game in the Witcher world.

While that’s a lot of negatives to swallow, believers in Hearthstone can still be found in China. In the foothills of HTS Season 4, several new teams have been founded, offering many a notable player a good payday.

Team YingDi was created by the Chinese game media and has established a two-division system. The top division consists exclusively of salaried competitive players, including “LVGE”, a quarter-finalist from HCT Winter Championship, and "EdwadElric", finalist of 2016 APAC Spring Championship. The lower division is what Tann calls a “helping-each-other-out group”, made for information exchange and to find new talent. These up-and-comers are not salaried but receive compensation when they represent YingDi in local tournaments and/or are also high legend, meaning the company has high chances of qualifying for the next HCT championship. YingDi also pays for content creation and looks to provide support for those willing to compete in western tournaments like DreamHack.

Opposite of YingDi in terms of organization is Team One More (OM). Founded on family riches, OM is akin to Invictus Gaming in the sense that it has employed almost exclusively esports stars, including Breath, Zoro, Xichen, XHope and JasonZhou—a true Hearthstone super-team.

“Both of these teams have a lot of money at their disposal and the player salaries are above the average from what I’m told,” Tann says.

Still, the limited chances to promote one’s brand is a dangerous situation to have, for both organizers and team owners. HTS continued to be the only team league in China and as with every tournament only a selected few can take part, leaving the rest in a sour dilemma: To keep maintaining a Hearthstone roster and try their luck in the unforgiving Gold Series or abandon the game.

According to an HTS representative, communication between the league and the orgs has been active, but there would always be bad news for some of the teams. “Disbandment” is also too vague a word to describe all seven fallouts of the aforementioned major teams, the HTS spokesperson told Esports Heaven, and gave two examples with eStar and NGA, which together explain all seven cases.

EStar’s one in particular is one very familiar to the western audience.

“At the beginning, eStar’s attempt of entering the competitive Hearthstone scene has been very aggressive in terms of capital investment. They signed too many high profile players at once by acquiring the entire Yolo Miracle. But Hearthstone isn't a game where you can profit by simply doing so, like people are used to in other games. One possible way for the organization to benefit from signing big names is to make them share their income from streaming. But that's just impossible for players to agree. This would be the main reason why eStar has fallen apart, along with so many other teams that leave Hearthstone is bad business model with no way of profiting or sustaining the cost.

Not a single player can be anywhere near dominant in the competitive scene due to the RNG nature of this game, so the value that a player holds to a team is mostly on the streaming side. Only if a team and the players can come to an agreement of sharing the earnings out of streaming or have plans in some other kind of cooperation regarding creation of content, it is hard to sustain.”

NGA’s situation is way simpler. It’s not even a real or complete disbandment. The team simply didn’t have enough top players to compete in the team league, hence were left out, but there’s still Hearthstone life left in the organization. It’s not all bleak.

In recent months, the Chinese players also discovered a new-found confidence. 2014 and 2015 passed under the sign of the region’s almost complete defeat on international level, which had led to the many “Versus” championships between China and the West, designed as proving grounds for the East. After China’s victory against Europe and North America in the last two international bouts, however, the proud nation realized something: They don’t need the West anymore and they certainly don’t need to pay it.

“Before in China when western players were known for being stronger than the Chinese players it was almost a ‘must’ to have a CN vs West part in a tournament if you aim big,” Tann says. “But now, the Chinese viewers are no longer that much interested in such competition. Not to mention the cost of inviting a western team to LAN has increased a lot. During the NEL era, we could easily invite Liquid, Nihilum and Tempo Storm with a small prize pool of $30K, but now it’s far from enough. Inviting lesser known players from the West that are not recognizable in China is also meaningless, and the compensation the famous players have asked for would take a lot of time of internal discussion for the organizer and sponsor to agree to. Sometimes they found it was not worth it.

Who to invite is another huge question. Big streamers or successful players from HCT? Some sponsors have no clue who’s who and it’s hard to explain to them why the big names they know of were doing ‘bad’ in HCT and why good players from HCT are harder to recognize by the Chinese viewers. It's no longer like before when there were these and these players that you had to invite and nobody would doubt your choice.”

* * *

Chinese Hearthstone is truly undergoing a change like never before and with so many facets interweaved, the state of the scene is up for debate. Croakers will see declining revenues, disbanding teams and variety streamers and argue as loud as their ignorance allows for the death of the game. Incorrigible optimists will look for the positive signs like China’s victories at home and abroad.

The truth, as it often does, lies in the middle. Chinese Hearthstone has underwent turmoil, that is true, but this turmoil is not exclusive to China. The West has seen teams disband, player retire, revenues drop, expansions flop and town-criers heralding the darkest of times.

But in neither scenes has that resulted in the abolishing of Hearthstone. For every CLG and Na`Vi in the West there’s a Virtus.pro and LG, and for every World Elite and eStar in China there’s YingDi and OM.

Hearthstone is not immortal on the card game throne and one day it will certainly be dethroned, either by the sundown of the genre or by a new, better, cheaper or more entertaining game.

But it’s clearly not this day.

If you enjoyed this piece, follow the author at @GGNydra.

Art courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment.