About Longzhu

Longzhu

Overview

Longzhu, also styled Longzhu TV and known by its domain Longzhu.com, was a Chinese game live-streaming platform established on 1 February 2015 and based in Suzhou, Jiangsu. It belonged to the generation of gamecasting platforms that emerged in China in the middle of the decade, when watching other people play video games became a mass entertainment format, and it was counted in industry studies of the period among China's main game webcast platforms alongside Douyu, Huya, Panda TV and Zhanqi. This profile is written in the past tense because Longzhu did not survive the sector's consolidation around Huya and Douyu.

Longzhu's history is short but well marked at its turning points. It was financed early by major investors, became the subject of a reported takeover bid by Suning's PPTV that would have made it the esports arm of a retail group's media ambitions, was named in a national regulatory enforcement sweep in 2017, and then faded as capital and audiences concentrated on the two largest survivors of the game-streaming war.

Founding and financing

Longzhu.com was established on 1 February 2015, at the moment when Chinese game streaming was moving from a niche of the PC-gaming world into a venture-funded industry. Contemporary reporting of the later takeover bid recorded that the company received RMB 300 million in Series A financing from SoftBank China and Tencent. An early round of that size, from investors of that standing, placed Longzhu immediately in the first rank of contenders by funding, in a market where platforms competed by signing star players and buying event rights.

The backing of Tencent was strategically significant. Tencent owned the games, including League of Legends through Riot Games and Honor of Kings domestically, that supplied most of the content Chinese game platforms streamed. A platform part-financed by Tencent stood closer to the source of its content than independent rivals. SoftBank China's participation likewise connected Longzhu to one of the most experienced technology investors in Asia at the moment of its launch.

The gamecasting model

Longzhu's product was gamecasting: live broadcasts of gameplay, professional matches and streamer performance, organised through the company's two constituent businesses, one focused on online streaming and the other on esports. Viewers watched through the Longzhu.com platform, followed individual streamers, and participated through the chat and gifting mechanics standard across Chinese live streaming, in which audiences buy virtual gifts for performers and premier players negotiate a base salary plus a share of gifts.

Academic study of China's livestreaming industry used platforms of Longzhu's type to explain the economics. Gameplayers were embedded in cross-industry structures of clubs, agents and platforms, and the competition for premier players was intense enough that executives across the sector described signing fees as a central cost. Longzhu operated inside that economy from its first year, and its early financing was in large part ammunition for it.

The Suning and PPTV takeover reports

In 2016-17 reports emerged that Suning-owned PPTV, the PPLive video company, was bidding to take over the two companies that made up Longzhu.com, acquiring 100 percent of the streaming company and 20 percent of the esports company. The reported logic was a division of labour inside Suning's media holdings: after the acquisition Suning would run PPTV for entertainment and Longzhu for esports. PPTV already held media rights including La Liga in China, and Suning had announced its entry into the entertainment industry in 2015 and owned the Suning Electronic Sports organisation.

The bid fitted Suning's wider sports expansion of the same years, which included buying the Korean League of Legends team Longzhu Gaming in November 2016, purchasing Inter Milan and spending a reported $700 million on Premier League broadcasting rights. A scholarly account of esports platforms in China likewise recorded Longzhu as owned by Suning among the major broadcasting channels of the period. The Longzhu name therefore became attached to a retail conglomerate's attempt to build a sports-media group spanning teams, rights and streaming distribution.

Longzhu Gaming and the name in esports

The platform's name travelled furthest through esports sponsorship. In 2015 the Chinese company Longzhu TV took a naming sponsorship of the existing Korean League of Legends professional team IM, which became Longzhu Gaming. Under Suning's ownership from late 2016 the team received investment in its team house, players, coaching staff and welfare, and in 2017 it produced one of the great surprise seasons in Korean League of Legends, beating SKT 3-0 in the LCK finals after an uneven debut season in 2016.

Because Suning also owned Suning Gaming, which competed in the same league, Riot Games' rules against dual interests required one team to be sold. Longzhu Gaming was sold and rebranded as Kingzone DragonX after the phone manufacturer Kingzone, while its players and coaches stayed the same. The episode illustrates how visible the Longzhu brand became in international esports even as the Chinese streaming platform behind the name faced a tightening market at home.

Regulation and the 2017 enforcement sweep

Longzhu operated through the years when Chinese regulators moved from tolerating the live-streaming boom to policing it. In its June 2017 enforcement reporting, China's Ministry of Culture said it had shut down 11,929 live broadcasting rooms for content violations, ordered 18,977 rooms to correct violations, reviewed 31,347 performers and investigated fifty major online performance operators. Violations were found at thirty platforms, and the ministry named gamecasting platform Longzhu Games Broadcast among them, alongside Huya and YY.

The wider crackdown of 2017 closed ten platforms entirely, punished forty-eight companies and ordered more than 30,000 studios closed, in a market the Associated Press described as worth about RMB 21 billion in 2016 with almost half of China's 730 million internet users using live video sites. For mid-sized platforms like Longzhu, compliance costs and content risk rose at exactly the moment when the economics of streamer signing were already squeezing them.

Position among China's game platforms

Industry studies of the period consistently placed Longzhu in the leading group below the very top. A Michigan-published study of esports in China listed the broadcasting and streaming platforms of the Tencent-centred esports economy as including Douyu, Huya and Longzhu alongside Tencent's own services, and the clean-file research for this profile records industry counts of China's five main game webcast platforms as Douyu, Huya, Panda TV, Longzhu and Zhanqi. Longzhu was, in other words, a recognised national platform, not a regional experiment.

That position did not guarantee survival. The same studies describe a market structured by Tencent's ownership of the underlying games and by its investments across platforms. When Tencent's backing concentrated behind Huya and Douyu, which it moved to control, the independent and conglomerate-owned mid-tier lost both its content leverage and its path to further funding on competitive terms.

Consolidation and disappearance

China's game-streaming sector consolidated brutally between 2018 and 2020. Panda TV, backed by Wang Sicong, closed in 2019; regulators blocked the proposed merger of Huya and Douyu in 2021 on competition grounds, by which time the two were already the acknowledged survivors. Longzhu did not survive the sector's consolidation around Huya and Douyu, and it left no continuing independent service of national significance.

The pattern was common to the whole "thousand-platform" era: platforms founded within months of each other in 2014-2015, financed to sign players and buy visibility, were winnowed within five years to a duopoly, with the rest absorbed, closed or reduced to shells. Longzhu's financing, its Suning connection and its regulatory record make it a representative case of that middle tier, large enough to matter nationally and not large enough to survive.

Suzhou base

Longzhu was based in Suzhou, Jiangsu, away from the Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen triangle that housed most major platforms. Suzhou's position in the Yangtze Delta, with its manufacturing wealth and proximity to Shanghai's media and finance, made it a plausible home for a venture-funded platform, and Longzhu's presence there was part of a wider spread of China's streaming industry into second centres during the boom years, before consolidation recentralised the surviving companies.

The Suzhou base also distinguishes Longzhu in the directory record from the many Shanghai-registered streaming companies of the same period. Its identity in sources is consistently tied to Longzhu.com and its 2015 establishment rather than to a parent broadcaster, reflecting its origin as a purpose-built gamecasting company.

Legacy

Longzhu's legacy is threefold. It was an early, well-financed entrant whose RMB 300 million Series A from SoftBank China and Tencent showed how quickly gamecasting became a serious investment category in 2015. It was the streaming half of Suning's esports design, paired in the reported PPTV takeover with an entertainment platform in a structure that anticipated later media-group strategies. And through Longzhu Gaming's 2017 LCK title run, its name reached a global esports audience larger than its domestic platform audience ever was.

For the directory, Longzhu is recorded as a historical outlet: a Suzhou game live-streaming platform, established 1 February 2015, financed by SoftBank China and Tencent, investigated in the Ministry of Culture's 2017 sweep, and closed by the consolidation that left Huya and Douyu dominant. Its history compresses the rise and fall of China's first game-streaming generation into a single company's five-year arc.