China has achieved another victory in e-sports: Chinese team Edward Gaming (EDG) won the country’s first world championship in the annual shooting game tournament Brave on Sunday.
The five-man professional team defeated the Spanish team Heretics 3:2 in the grand final of the Brave Champions in 2024, despite strong European competition. Brave is a shooting game developed by US-based Riot Games, a subsidiary of Tencent Holdings.
China’s esports industry has become a booming business, with “clubs” funded by the country’s young tycoons making an impression on the global stage. Separately, Chinese teams have won at least four of the 20-plus competitive titles at the Esports World Cup, a two-month, multi-game event in Saudi Arabia that concluded on Sunday.
The winning titles included Tencent’s best-selling mobile game Honor of Kings, League of Legends-Spin-off Teamfight TacticsJapanese title Street Fighter 6 And Strinova from Shenzhen-based studio iDreamSky.
The EDG club, which currently includes various teams competing for seven esports titles, was founded in September 2013 by Zhu Yihang, the eldest son of Hopson Development founder Zhu Mengyi, who heads one of the top five private real estate companies in southern Guangdong province.
To win the Brave Championship, the team shares a prize money of $1 million.
Zheng Yongkang, who played the role of sniper in the team, was named the most valuable player in the final. His other teammates included three players from mainland China and one player from Taiwan.
The Chinese video game and e-sports community was thrilled with the victory. On Sunday evening, the topic “EDG wins championship” quickly became the top trending topic on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, generating tens of millions of views within a few hours.
“This has completely exceeded our expectations,” said Chen Shiyi, a 23-year-old Brave Player in Shanghai. “The FPS game genre has been dominated by European and American players for a long time. Nobody, at least me and my fellow players, expected a Chinese team to win.”
The championship win is also expected to give a boost to Tencent, which operates the Chinese version of the game. When it launched in China in 2023, the title was touted by the company as its “most important game” of the year, backed by a 1 billion yuan ($140.4 million) investment.
