Writer: Zhang Da
Kr-Asia learned that, Kaiheikeji Digital’s Baoji Dianjing (暴鸡电竞), a platform of game sparring, recently secured 45 million yuan of series A financing led by Sequoia Capital China, followed by ZhenFund and Morningside Venture Capital. The money will be mainly used for product R&D, upgrade, and marketing.
Baoji Dianjing was established in January 2017. The name is pronounced similarly with Chinese phrase “critical strike”. Back at its inception stage, the startup received millions of yuan from its angel investor, Autobot Capital Partners. In April 2017, it got tens of millions of yuan in Pre-A round financing from ZhenFund and Morningside Venture Capital.
As the founder and CEO, Guan Zhiyuan, who had some connections with Tencent, used to be the marketing team leader for eSports games at Tencent Interactive Entertainment. Under his leadership, CrossFire (mobile version), King of Glory and other eSports games achieved great success.
According to the team, Baoji Dianjing has amassed over 1.2 million registered users, among which 0.6 million are monthly active. In King of Glory alone, over 10,000 orders for game sparring are being placed every day.
It is worth noting that, the company launched a game sparring program for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (ver. 1.9), which was released this month. Since then, it has brought over hundreds of orders on a daily basis.
The platform offers four types of sparring programs: Regular, Selected, Premium and Guru-led Team. The first three are tailored for players of different levels. The fourth is similar to uberPool, where one pro gamer will lead two players for better gaming experience. In this case, players are able to split the training fee while having more interactions with each other.
According to Guan, game sparring program essentially improves beginners’ gaming experience, since they can learn techniques, map awareness and teamwork in eSports games.
“You could consider walkthroughs as the game training model 1.0, tutorial videos as version 2.0. The newest version 3.0, then, shall be the one-to-one coaching between veterans and beginners,” said Guan, “Put simply, if you want to learn badminton, watching thousands of video can’t help at all. The best way is one-to-one coaching on practice.”
For the coming years, Baoji Dianjing will further pilot higher value-added business models besides eSports sparring platform, especially after gathering a slew of high-value users, and big spenders.