How e-sports are taking district by storm

The gaming club Royal Never Give Up beat back a team from Edward Gaming International recently to win the Demacia Cup, a big event of the video game League of Legends.

Jointly held by Tencent and Riot Games, Demacia is the second-largest professional League of Legends competition in China, usually seen as a warm-up for the top ring League of Legends Pro League the next year.

The two competing clubs were registered in Minhang and seek greater glory in the southern Hongqiao area, where e-sports is an emerging industry of vigorous growth.

Royal Never Give Up was champion in 2018 Pro League spring, winning gold on behalf of China at the Asian Games E-sport. The team’s company has plans to build an e-sport stadium that can hold 1,500 people for games in the future.

That would extend to the construction of an e-sport industrial ecology park in the district.

Edward Gaming International, on the other hand, has been a five-time winner of Pro League and the Demacia Cup, and was the first Chinese team to come up tops in the world-level game Mid-Season Invitational.

Supergen Investment, which owns Edward Gaming, will establish an International New Cultural Innovation Center in southern Hongqiao, serving as the home stadium for Shanghai League of Legends.

It is also one of 14 key projects in Minhang’s goal of promoting the innovative industry’s development in a three-year campaign unveiled in 2018.

The overall project, at the cost of about 6.5 billion yuan (US$942.5 million), includes a gaming stadium and related facilities. It is scheduled to be completed in three phases, with work set to kick off in the first half of this year.

Aiming to be the first one-stop and standard e-sport park in China, the project will accommodate areas for gaming, games development and sales, club communications, e-sport industrial big data research, sci-tech experience, new media and education, new video experience and supporting industries.

The stadium will have capacity for 6,000 people. Advanced equipment will be installed to guarantee an exciting gaming experience for players and audience alike.

In the past, venues for such games worldwide were usually rented, and games could be easily interrupted by problems with network speed or bandwidth.

‘E-Sport Business District’

The new stadium will revolutionize the industry, said Yuan Jiangzhu, head of Supergen. It will promote an “E-Sport Business District,” while taking into

consideration the neighborhood and its residents.

Multiple layers of e-sport will open to showcase different aspects of the industry, including a themed hotel, a performance center that accommodates 1,200 guests and an e-sports culture museum.

The daily flow of the park is designed to accommodate 10,000 visitors.

Sponsors hope the facilities in the park will attract more than 2,000 professionals from home and abroad to invigorate the industry.

According to Wu Jinghua, chief executive of Supergen, the park will be a “self-supporting” complex that brings people and industrial integration together.

As to the choice of site, Yuan cited favorable conditions such as access convenience that includes 10 Metro and railway lines that run through the district, and support from local government.

He also cited Shanghai policies aimed at the development of e-sports and the industrial upgrade ongoing in the southern Hongqiao area.

The park is expected to anchor Shanghai as a global hub for e-sports competition and development.