Game boosters helping gamers jump China’s Great Firewall anger players overseas as Beijing turns a blind eye
- The limited launch of League of Legends: Wild Rift caused a surge of interest in game booster apps from NetEase, Tencent and others
- Skirmishes between Chinese and overseas gamers have become a frequent occurrence as players seek out games unavailable in China
When Riot Games’ League of Legends: Wild Rift finally launched on October 29, Japanese gamers who had been eagerly awaiting the title for a year were quick to download the mobile game. But they did not expect the flood of antagonistic Chinese players they found when they started playing.
The result was clashes between players from the two countries as they exchanged insults in the game. Some Chinese players adopted crude nicknames for their accounts, such as Beat Little Japan to Death, to rally other nationalists to taunt Japanese players.
A number of Chinese tech companies, including gaming giants NetEase and Tencent Holdings, now make their own game boosters. Tencent declined to comment for this story and NetEase did not respond to a request for comment
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Just after the game’s release, NetEase’s UU Game Booster shot up to the top of the download chart on Apple’s App Store in China. Over the next two weeks, the app racked up more than 2.5 million downloads, according to app tracking firm Qimai Data. Tencent Booster and three other game boosters were also among the country’s top 10 most-downloaded apps in the days following the game’s release.
Theoretically, gamers in China are not supposed to be able to play games that are not officially released in the country. Unlike most other markets, China has strict approval requirements that require game studios to jump through extra hoops to get a license for each game they want to sell.
Valve Corp’s Steam has also long sold unapproved games to Chinese users from its international store while the government appears to have turned a blind eye. But the games that have to connect to overseas servers can be notoriously slow. So companies developed game boosters to give players fast and reliable connections to their favourite titles.
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By offering access to specific gaming servers and no other content, game boosters exist in a legal grey area.
“Their network is only the proxy’s game server IP through a firewall or routing strategy, and it cannot be used to access other servers. Other websites such as Google and YouTube will not work,” said Charlie Smith, the co-founder of Greatfire.org, an organisation that monitors the behaviour of the Great Firewall.
Smith, speaking under a pseudonym, said many users in China use game boosters despite the legal ambiguity.
“There is no law stipulating whether accelerators are legal or illegal,” he said. “There are already a lot of accelerator services. But there are many accelerators available for PC and mobile.”
Now Chinese gamers have fast connections to games that used to face serious speed constraints from throttled internet traffic. As a result, they have acquired a reputation for flooding overseas servers.
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China has more gamers than all the video game players in the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined. Many of these gamers enjoy playing overseas, leading to more frequent in-game conflict between Chinese and foreign players.
“A major problem is the language barrier. They won’t speak English. The emphasis is on ‘won’t’,“ said Marion Santos, a 22-year-old Filipino gamer who works as a customer service representative.
Santos has also been playing Wild Rift, but he said the influx of Chinese gamers has made it difficult to play in the Philippines.
In the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre, two teams of several players are pitted against each other. In the case of Wild Rift, each team has five players who need to communicate and work together to defeat the opposing team. But it is no longer uncommon for players on any given server to find themselves outnumbered by Chinese speakers.
“Even in the character-picking phase of the game, you’d think they’ll cooperate with you when you ask them nicely to speak English,” Santos said. “It’s either they don’t understand English or refuse to do so.”
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Accessing more games is just one of many reasons Chinese gamers often look to circumvent the Great Firewall. Some people also do it to avoid playing heavily censored versions of games available at home.
Repulsed by what they saw as Tencent caving to regulators, many gamers downloaded UU Game Booster to play the original PUBG Mobile, which Tencent was unable to monetise through in-game purchases in China until the rebranded version was finally approved by regulators.
“There are a lot of Chinese gamers playing on overseas servers,” said Zheng Jintiao, co-founder of the online media outlet GamerBoom. “And this also holds true for many Chinese-made games. These Chinese games also have built their own overseas versions.”
Warren Lee, technical director of the esports company Total Equation, said that server hopping is a much more common practice in China than in the West. Esports is helping to fuel this trend, he said, because an increasing number of Chinese gamers want to compete with international players.
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“Chinese gamers want to play on an international stage. That’s the biggest draw,” Lee said, “Being number one in China is definitely worth talking about. But the thing is they don’t want to settle for that. They want to be the best in the world.”
However, this push into overseas servers has led to some high-profile clashes in some games.
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That same month, the southern province of Guangdong, home to many of the country’s gaming companies, reportedly issued a directive instructing companies to help “prevent the politicisation of games”, according to Chinese media Gamelook. The directive also forbids companies from allowing Chinese gamers to get on the same server and chat with players in other countries and from offering access to unapproved foreign games.
Yet the popularity of game boosters persists, and there are no signs yet that they will be curbed soon. Since they do not offer access to blocked websites like Google or Facebook, some people think it might not be a priority for regulators.
Charlie Moseley, founder of gaming hobbyist group China Gaming Federation, said Chinese regulators likely tolerate the existence of foreign games in China because, despite some examples to the contrary, they largely remain apolitical.
“China naturally wants to control the culture of the country, but limiting access to foreign games is probably not a top priority,” he said.
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Others reason that authorities might have left game boosters untouched on purpose.
“The authorities would rather people spend their time playing games instead of searching out news and information critical of Beijing’s leadership,” Great Fire’s Smith said.
Even if they are getting a pass from regulators, though, gamers may soon have to contend with restrictions from the companies they support. Two weeks after it launched Wild Rift, Riot Games announced that it would block “a few of the highest volume VPN services outside of the beta regions.”
In an email to the Post, Riot did not mention Chinese gamers specifically. “Players who had been using a VPN to log in to the game actually span several regions, not just one or two locations,” the company said.
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Other games, such as Apex Legends and Escape from Tarkov, have tried to set region locks to keep out players from China, but game boosters easily bypass the restrictions.
As with other digital circumvention tools, a crackdown on game boosters could become another technological game of cat and mouse as developers, regulators and companies all try to stay ahead of each other. But game boosters have already been around for years and remain openly available from China’s biggest tech firms.
“I first started using them in 2017 with the release of PUBG,” Moseley said. “It didn’t work at all in China, but with a booster, my friends and I could connect to the huge audience outside of China and enjoy the game.”
Lee also attested to the software’s continuing popularity. “All my friends use [UU Game Booster]. A mate in Shanghai told me about it, and my pal who’s in Beijing now uses it too.”
“It is the only way Chinese gamers can play freely and compete with the best in the world,” he added.
