Everyone has heard that Douyu CEO Chen Shaojie was arrested by the police two days ago. This rumor has actually been going on for a long time, but before the dust settles, rumors are flying all over the Internet, including theories about money laundering and involvement in Myanmar. But judging from the police announcement,The current crime charged against Chen Shaojie is "the crime of opening a casino."As soon as this incident came out, a big earthquake occurred in the entire game live broadcast circle.
Various game anchors, even many well-known big anchors such as Xuxu Baobao, have stopped broadcasting directly because of family emergencies or something they have recently been busy with.
Even Doinb, a well-known Korean anchor in the LOL circle, rushed back to South Korea because his family was sick.
Not only that,Careful netizens also discovered that the videos recorded by these anchors over the past few years were disappearing little by little.
Even Doinb can't even "survive" the ancient video from 7 years ago.
According to online rumors,Another former head outdoor anchor of Douyu, Qian Xiaojia (who has now switched to Huya), told everyone in the fan group that he was implicated in Chen Shaojie's casino opening and "may have to go in" to cooperate with the investigation. "If you are lucky for a month, you will be unlucky for a year."
So did Chen Shaojie open Douyu into a casino?
Until the specific details come out, we can't say anything.
But currently,The biggest controversy is still over the "reward lottery".
Everyone knows that any live broadcast platform or any anchor is inseparable from the reward mechanism.
Under normal circumstances, these gifts are voluntarily given to the anchor by the audience out of love for the anchor.
This is a bit like the busking under the ancient overpass. The main purpose is to support the rich people for a money show, and the poor people to support the personal show.
But slowly, this simple way of hawking and giving rewards changed.
毕竟单纯靠粉丝观众叫好、打赏，来钱实在慢，于是就有了花式刺激 “ 打赏 ” 的套路。
For example, introduce a struggle mechanism and play PK with other anchors. The winning condition is which side has more fans giving rewards;
For example, the introduction of "fan light tags" and other exclusive logos that can only be obtained by recharging, and requiring light tags to enter the fan group.
However, rewards like the above are more or less fans’ support for the anchor.
But when it came to the "Card Lottery", I started to get confused.
"Applying a card" actually means that you spend a few dollars to authenticate yourself as a fan of a certain anchor, and at the same time get a "dog tag" as a sign.
The problem lies here.
Although you only need to buy one card if you want to be certified as a fan, the card itself can be purchased repeatedly. This means that during the lottery, users can increase their winning rate by buying more cards.
Therefore, some people have a gambling mentality and buy dozens or hundreds of cards at once. Anyway, as long as they win, they will get their money back.
In response to this situation, Xiaofa also consulted a friend A Tian (pseudonym) who has a doctorate in law at Tsinghua University.
He told us that it is difficult to say whether an online lottery is considered gambling. It not only depends on whether it is compliant and legal, but also based on the actual situation.
In A Tian's view, the most important thing is whether the ultimate goal of everyone spending money to apply for a card is to reward rewards or to make money. If it is for making money, there is a high probability that it will be judged as gambling.
If applying for card draws is sometimes more like rewarding anchors, then some of the treasure-hunting activities launched by Douyu before are closer to gambling.
In this event, the anchor will take the initiative to put various huge benefits into the treasure lottery prize pool, and fans will buy a large number of lottery tickets to increase the probability of digging for treasure.
The anchor Doinb mentioned earlier put 120,000 into the prize pool in a treasure hunting activity.
And these operations were really judged as gambling by the court.
As early as 2020, Douyu's former top outdoor anchor "彡彡九 Outdoor" used the lottery module of the platform's "Fans Welfare Club" to organize large-scale lottery gambling for fans "water friends".
In the live broadcast room, several anchors kept shouting the guidance words of "One card can get 50,000 yuan to take home" and "Try to turn a bicycle into a motorcycle."
Outside of the live broadcast room, fans are constantly encouraged to participate in card drawing and gambling on platforms such as Fish Bar and WeChat groups.
After the lottery is over, there will be a dedicated person responsible for verifying the winner's information and winning amount, obtaining the winner's Alipay account, WeChat account, bank card account and other information, and distributing the winning cash to the winner.
According to reports,In just three and a half years, the live broadcast room has held more than 4,200 lottery draws, and the frequency has almost caught up with Lotto and Double Color Ball.
It attracted nearly 4.5 million people to participate and earned nearly 120 million yuan.
Finally, he was punished by law at the end of last year, and several of the main culprits were imprisoned.
In addition to the above mentioned, there are many other pornographic operations suspected of gambling on live broadcast platforms. However, in many cases, these operations can be interpreted as the personal behavior of the anchor, and the platform is at best poorly supervised.
But from various sources, it seems that Douyu may be a little sidelined.
According to previous reports on China.com, anchor Xiaowei (pseudonym) told reporters, "For example, if the anchor's turnover is 1 million, 50% of the income goes directly to the platform, and the remaining 50% of the income needs to be returned to the winning audience. After personal income tax is removed, the rest is the anchor's net income."
If you calculate it this way, in such a "gamble", the audience of the lottery may not make money, and the anchor who opens the market may not make money, but the platform will definitely make money.
Therefore, in the face of this income, Douyu Super Management will also take the initiative to tell the anchor how to avoid legal risks.
Screenshot of Douyu’s guidance anchor’s speech document (source provided by insider: Daily Economic News)
Moreover, the person in charge of Douyu at the time also stated to the outside world,The lottery behavior of live broadcast rooms and anchors is not gambling, but "prize sales" in the commercial field.
According to relevant national laws, as long as the lottery amount does not exceed 50,000, it is neither illegal nor illegal.
But A Tian told us that this statement is obviously untenable. If the above conditions are met, it "only represents basic compliance. On top of compliance, a substantive review must be added."
In fact, in the past few years, Douyu’s problems go far beyond gambling.
There has been a legend circulating on the Internet that "after 23 o'clock, Douyu dares to do anything", which means that after 11 o'clock in the evening, Douyu will be sidelined and the content of soft porn will rise sharply.
A Qiang (pseudonym), a game live broadcast user, also told us,Especially in "In the first half of this year, the anchors in the dance area were very lively after nine or ten o'clock, and they exposed their thighs and lay on their sides on the bed for live broadcasts."
Although in May, relevant departments stationed on the Douyu platform to carry out a one-month intensive rectification and supervision.
Aqiang also told us: "Later, this situation became less common. It turned out that the dancing anchors were all sitting on chairs chatting, and most of them even had microphones."
But now after 11 o'clock in the evening, Douyu still has many PKs, and those who fail are still "punished" by singing and dancing.
An employee of the compliance department of a major long-form video manufacturer once confided to us:"The domestic live broadcast industry is a process of exploring the bottom line. If the bottom line is too low, it will be difficult to do it. "
As a former live broadcaster, the name Douyu comes from the Thai fighting fish. Chen Shaojie once publicly stated that "Douyu" is a folk animal in Thailand. This kind of fish is aggressive and fierce.
And the Douyu platform named after this has indeed demonstrated extremely strong combat effectiveness.
In the "Thousand Broadcast War", whether it is frantically testing the "bottom line", spending money to grab anchors, or doing marketing and generating popularity, Douyu has almost no rivals.
In the end, Douyu managed to survive to the end and was successfully listed on Nasdaq.
But it’s similar to the many “wars” we’ve heard about on the Internet. After spending crazy money in the early stage, the cornucopia that we fought desperately to grab was actually just a saline-alkali land with no grass growing on it.
As for the battle between game live broadcast platforms, this is probably the case.
Although Douyu has restrained a lot since "coming ashore" and tried a lot, it has stepped up internal audits to crack down on pornographic gambling and violence, and has also made various attempts to make money externally.
However, Douyu's game label in everyone's mind is too heavy, its transformation path is far away, and it has never been able to make big money.
On the other hand, the negative consequences of the generous signing of celebrity anchors back then are gradually becoming apparent.
If the revenue cannot be raised, the signing fee becomes a burden, so that in the end it cannot retain people. For example, Xuxu Baobao switched to Douyin this year.
As the comprehensive video platforms Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili began to focus on the gaming industry, the so-called "professional" Douyu was quickly defeated in the face of huge traffic.
In 2020, Douyu and its old rival Huya jointly announced the "Merger Agreement and Plan" to merge 1:1 based on market value. The merged company will be Tencent Holdings.
But in the end, the merger was officially stopped due to antitrust investigations.
In April this year, Tencent and Bytedance reached a long- and short-term video cooperation and began to explore the joint promotion and secondary creation of long- and short-term videos. At that time, many people felt that Douyu had begun to be essentially abandoned by Tencent.
Perhaps because of this, Douyu chose to rediscover the "original intention" of the "Qianbo War".
In the end, the CEO was arrested, the stock price fell below $1, and it began to face the risk of delisting.
Interestingly, as Chen Shaojie said, betta fish is a folk animal in Thailand. This kind of fish is aggressive and fierce.
What he didn't say is that in Thailand, fighting fish are professional "gladiators" in the gambling industry such as cockfighting and cricket fighting. Until now, there are still people who specially cultivate fighting fish for gambling entertainment.
It turns out that fighting fish has always been associated with the word "gambling".