Investigated, jailed, killed: China’s young gaming tycoons suffered in 2020, as did their companies
- Three of China’s billionaire gaming executives have faced investigation, criminal conviction and death, adding to the tumult of the country’s gaming industry
- Lin Qi, an executive producer for Netflix’s The Three-Body Problem, drew international attention when he died on Christmas from a suspected poisoning
A group of Chinese gaming industry executives in their 30s, who had shared a rise in fame and fortune to become the country’s youngest billionaires in recent years, have suffered setbacks and misfortunes in 2020 in another sign of the unpredictability of China’s business world.
In the latest case, Wang Yue, the 37-year-old billionaire founder of Shanghai Kingnet Network, was sentenced by a Shanghai court to five-and-a-half years in prison for manipulating stock prices, the company said in an announcement on December 25.
On the same day, Lin Qi, the 39-year-old founder of game company Yoozoo, died in hospital after a suspected poisoning by a colleague. Last week, 32-year-old Wang Jian, the millennium chairman of Jinke Culture, was put under investigation for insider trading, the company said in a stock market filing on December 21.
While the three high-profile cases are not related, the three men are all members of a generation of young gaming industry executives, along with a few others born in the 1980s such as Liu Liang at U9 Game and Wang Shijun at Diandianle, who followed similar paths to becoming billionaires and who once hoped to challenge incumbent gaming giants Tencent Holdings and NetEase.
They were the darlings of investors, riding high on the exuberance around the future of mobile and browser-based games at the time. One common method of benefiting from gaming in the mid-2010s was using reverse takeovers of struggling listed companies, which is how Kingnet, U9 Game and Yoozoo went public.