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When talking about eSport in China, the nameHao 'zax' Chou will definitely be said at least once in every few conversations, as he become one of the most important people in the Chinese scene during the last few years. Zax started to work forreplays.net almost four years ago now and since he's been there he became the head of the site - one of the biggest WarCraft pages on the web, and he's also the head and even the inventor ofStarsWar. During our flight back from the StarsWar host city Xi'an, to Shanghai, I caught up with him for an interview - and there couldn't be a better way to get the European scene aware of the huge dimensions of eSports in Asia.

Hi zax. Congratulations for a very successful third edition of StarsWar. What do you, as the creator, think about the third edition of the event? Was it successful from your view?
Hello. If I had to give a score to this edition of StarsWar I would give 7 out of 10 points for it because there were some problems like the internet and some stage problems. Additionally I was not very happy with the date of the event because there were some conflicts with other events.

The first two editions of StarsWar were in Shanghai, this time you moved it to Xi'an. Why did you change the host city?
There were three reasons for moving it to Xi'an. First was we wanted to make the event more known in the whole country so that fans from other cities have the chance to watch the event live. The second reason is that we did a lot of events already and knew that there are a lot of fans over the whole of China, so we were very sure a lot of people in Xi'an would come to watch StarsWar live. Third but not least, Xi'an is a very beautiful and ancient city so we think the players would get a very good impression of China here.

That's true, the contrasts between Xi'an and Shanghai were really impressive. You said you expected a lot of visitors for the event which became definitely true. Do you know how many visitors came on both days and how much did the visitors have to pay?
There were about two or three thousand visitors each day but we expected a little more as I mentioned the date conflicts already. At StarsWar 2 we had about 5,000 people every day. Additionally, there were always about 200,000 people watching GamesTV while the events were running. The entry price was 20 yuan* for a visitor and 50 yuan for VIP-tickets.
*20 yuan is about two euros, that's about the price you pay for the taxi to the event.

That's still really a lot compared to European events. Are there just so many more fans or can you see another reason for it?
I think both, of course there are many more fans as there are many more people living in China. But I also think Asian tournaments pay more attention on the broadcasting effect than European tournaments do. For example in Asia players play on the stage so everybody can watch them and it's more worth to visit the event.

As there were so many people watching, Warcraft 3 seems to be a very important market in China, is the game really that famous?
I think every game by Blizzard is very popular in China. I heard there were sold 3,000,000 copies of Warcraft 3 in China, so you can imagine how big the market is. That might also be the reason why WEG moved completely to China this year, as CS and WC3 are the most popular games here while Koreans mainly care for StarCraft.

Unfortunately there were serious problems with the internet at the location, so there was no WaaaghTV and GGTV. Do you regret this or is it ok as the TV Stream is the most important in China?
I really regret that the internet at the event was weaker than expected but it was our fault, as we didn't know the campus internet of the Xi'an University before and there were also problems for the TV stream because of this. We will care more for this next time.

'Next time' is a good point. Can you already tell us anything about StarsWar 4?
There will definitely be a StarsWar 4! I think it might be held in December or maybe January next year. We haven't decided about the location yet as there are a lot of facts to be thought of, like the stadium, the number of fans and of course the internet.

Might it be in Xi'an again or do you want to move to another city? If yes, what city might it be?
We will very probably go to another city once more. Maybe Beijing or maybe Guangzhou. But I really don't know yet maybe even Hong Kong.

It sounds interesting! Will StarsWar keep growing so that we may even see a forth team from America sometime?
We would really like to have a team from USA, but I don't think Warcraft is very popular there as there are not so many good players to compete in StarsWar. But of course the countries are not fixed, if there will be another good country with a lot of good players we will think about add them and add one more day to StarsWar.

That would be nice. When talking about growth, we also have to talk about the insane growth of GamesTV. How do you think they were able to improve so much compared to last year?
GamesTV started with a staff of ten people and now has 40 full-time workers and is casting about all eSport games and console games, I think this shows the growth best. The improvement was mainly because of the new techniques. Last year they had usual servers which were able to handle 1,000 viewers each server. This year a new P2P-System was used, which allowed 10,000 people per server and also improved the latency for non-Asian users.

Thank you very much for the interview and good luck for the next StarsWar. Any shoutouts in the end?
Thank you for the interview and also thank you to all players, the complete StarsWar staff and of course Gigabyte for their support.

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