Role Playing Industry:
Hard Act to Follow
The popularity of clubs that host live action role playing, known in the community as LARP, has seen a whole host of entrants to the sector trying to outdo one another with evermore elaborate scripts, costumes and theatrical-style sets to appeal to China's young consumers with disposable income eager for new pastimes.
Many of the new players in town have found they are in a battle for survival that is every bit as cutthroat as the murder mystery or action scenarios they stage.
Compared to traditional tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, LARPING supports a much wider range of stories and puts players personally into roles. Participants act out plots with the help of realistic scenery and costumes provided by the LARP studios that organize the games. LARPERS can experience the lives of other people in different eras such as a general in ancient times or a spy in the Republic of China (1911-1949), or play fictional roles like a time traveler.
LARPING became mainstream in China in 2016 with Hunan
Television's Who is the Murderer, a detective reality show with a cast of pop stars. Over past four years, LARP clubs, the offline venues that organize LARPING, have been springing up in cities. According to a recent survey by Meituan Research Institute, China had around 30,000 LARP clubs by November 2020, with an estimated market value of 10 billion yuan (US$1.5B). The popularity has triggered a boom in associated businesses, including costume and prop making, set decoration and script writing.
At the same time, analysts and some club operators are warning that the market is saturated and faces diminishing returns. The emerging industry is highly dependent on quality scripts, which are already in short supply, and clubs cost a lot to operate. Many new entrants have already gone bankrupt.
Social and Immersive
“LARPING has become a fixture of our company's team building and we've even got a LARP community just for fun outside of work,” Arron Liu, an HR officer at a trade company in Hangzhou,
Zhejiang Province, told Newschina. He said many young coworkers love LARPING and it has really helped with communication across departments. “LARPING helped us expand our social circle as members invite friends from outside the company to join in,” he said.
Compared to traditional tabletop games, Larp-based games require more interaction among players, who must immerse themselves in the scenario. As most LARP games require 5-10 players, Meituan, a shopping and entertainment platform, launched a service to connect players, which many use as a way to make new friends.
“I think LARPING is helpful for people with social anxiety like me,” Cao Xi, a LARPER in Beijing, told Newschina. “Many shy and timid people would like to be more open and LARPING is a good way to break the ice,” she said.
“I heard some people now choose LARP studios as a meeting place for blind dates. It's a good idea. Compared to having dinner or watching a movie, LARPING is a better way for two strangers to get know each other more deeply and quickly,” she added.
According to the Meituan survey, LARPERS aged between 20 and 35 accounted for 83.9 percent of those surveyed. They have disposable income and are interested in games and offline social activities.
The growing demand has in turn pushed the LARP community to diversify and evolve. Games have complex stories and scripts rather than a simple murder case. Romantic scenarios are popular with women.
“Many friends and I shed tears when we played [a romance game called] ‘Hello,'” Cao said. The scenario involves separate love stories of three couples.
“The increasingly inclusive LARP scripts lowered the threshold for new players. The focus of the game has shifted from logical reasoning to being immersed,” Lu Shen, owner of a LARP club, told Daily Sunshine, a newspaper based in Shenzhen.
Peripheral Businesses
The LARP boom supports ancillary businesses, including set decoration, advertising, personnel training and costume and prop making.
“New LARP studios established in the past six months or so have rescued many small interior design companies from going broke,” Gao Yun, who decorates LARP clubs in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, told Newschina.
“LARP studios require themed decoration, the price of which varies according to material and style. A realistic scene in a room of between 100-300 square meters, for example, costs 600-1,500 yuan (US$88221) per square meter, and a medium-sized new LARP studio costs about 200,000-400,000 yuan (US$29,412-58,824) just to decorate, much higher than for traditional tabletop board game clubs,” he said.
A costume maker in Jiangsu Province surnamed Chen agreed that LARPING had saved many businesses. “Many costume makers that used to work for photo studios have shifted to the LARP industry,” he told Newschina. “Drama costumes, qipao and suits from the Republic of China era are most frequently used in LARP games, so LARP clubs' costume needs are quite similar to those of photo studios. As the costumes are just for playing games, they have lower design requirements so it's easier to scale up production. Many costume makers have survived the [Covid-19] pandemic thanks to orders from LARP clubs,” he added.
The game has also produced a new profession, game masters. They direct the game, condition the atmosphere and make judgments. The game master is key to a LARP studio's popularity. Media reported that a game master in a first-tier city earns around 4,000-8,000 yuan (US$588-1,177) a month.
“A professional game master is crucial for a studio. Even if they're using the same script, different masters give you a totally different experience and we won't visit a club again if we find their game master isn't professional enough,” Beijing player Cao said, adding that now there are many training courses for game masters.
Script Struggles
Script writers are at the sharp end of the LARP industry and feel the whims of the market first. Wang Sansan, a script writer, told Newschina that the online chat group for LARP script writers he set up last October has quickly expanded to 500 members over the past six months. “Most writers in the chat group are young people born since the 1990s... They used to write online novels or work with social media and some of them do it as a part-time job,” he said.
According to Wang, LARP scripts fall into three types. Exclusive ones are used only in one club, city-limited scripts are performed in at most three clubs in a single city and package scripts are available to any club. Quality and price varies, with the cheapest package scripts going for around 500 yuan (US$74), the city-limited ones 2,000 yuan (US$294) and the exclusive ones 5,000-20,000 yuan (US$736-2,941).
“A writer gets 20-50 percent of the profits. The specific rate varies with the script quality, the popularity of the writer and the sales volume,” he said.
Even writing the cheapest package script is not easy. “Over the past six months, I only sold one package script. I do it in my free time and now I'm busy revising my second script,” Jiang Yu, a freelance LARP writer, told Newschina.
“Writing LARP scripts depends on one's interests, since the earn
ings are quite unstable and it's really tough to write a quality one,” he added.
Each role in a six-character package script needs a 5,000-word plot as well as general instructions and plot points. It adds up to around 40,000 words, Jiang said, and it often takes three to four months before a script is sold. This means it takes a long time for a writer to see a return on their effort, especially full-time writers and newcomers.
“Full-time writers are all racking their brains. I write seven hours a day and produce one script a week, but even if the script passes through every link smoothly, it'll take at least a month to have it published,” Chen Nian, a full-time LARP script writer, told Newschina.
The long production cycle and unstable income means original LARP scripts are in short supply which drives rampant piracy. “The [script writing] community is in disarray due to lack of supervision and regulation... Many writers just copy the most popular scripts and sell them to other publishers, and this jeopardizes the interests of writers, studios and players, while protecting our rights and interests is very costly,” Chen Nian said.
“LARP scripts are mainly sold via publishers, platforms and expos, while the exclusive and city-limited ones are only available at expos,” a publisher of LARP scripts in Beijing surnamed Guo told Newschina. “To reduce cost, many new clubs, especially those in smaller cities, turned to pirated scripts,” he said. A pirated 500-yuan (US$75) package script sells for only 100 yuan (US$15).
A LARP studio operator in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, who gave the name Jimmy, told Guangzhou-based magazine New Weekly that some platforms sell e-editions of 1,000 scripts for not much more than a dollar.
“After all, the scripts are the core of LARPING,” he said.
Smoke and Mirrors
According to Jimmy, he and his partner Sasa have tried hard to distinguish their clubs from others to ace out their competitors. They revise scripts to make them distinctive and can spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on staging the scenes. Not only did they recoup their initial investment of 1 million yuan (US$147,059) within two years, their club has the highest satisfaction rating on customer review platform Dianping.
But Jimmy suggests people should be cautious about the LARP industry. “Many people want to grab a slice of the pie, but it's not that easy. You have to take hidden costs into consideration. For example, you build an expensive realistic set, but it might only last a year and then you'll have to install a new one when the players get tired of the old script,” he said.
Gu Yuan, a LARP club owner in Shanghai, said he is planning to sell, although it has only been open for a few months.
“I have to pay 15,000 yuan (US$2,206) a month to rent the 120-square-meter space for the studio and pay another 6,000 yuan (US$882) for wages. I also spent over 200,000 yuan (US$29,412) on decoration and props. Supposing a game needs seven players on average, each paying 268 yuan (US$39), I have to run at least 15 games every month to support the studio, but the reality is in a first-tier city, the prime time for players is on weekends, and on workdays the studio only puts on two games [on average],” he said.
“Since the Spring Festival [which fell in February in 2021], few realistic-scene clubs can turn a profit due to high operating costs and low retention rates, as a game generally lasts 4-8 hours and few players want to play the same script twice,” he added.
A club owner in Beijing surnamed Zhang agreed. “Ninety percent of my customers are between 15 to 35, and they are either at school or at work, so they play only on weekends or during holidays. We can earn 40,000 yuan (US$5,882) a month during summer vacation, but not much in the slack season,” he told Newschina.
LARP studios in smaller cities where life is not so frenetic tend to see steadier business, but the scene is extremely competitive.
“More and more studios are opening and want their share of the action before the old ones have recouped their cost... One year ago, a district in Guiyang [capital of Guizhou Province] only had three to five LARP studios, but now there are nearly 20,” a LARP club owner in Guiyang who did not reveal his name told Newschina.
“It is no exaggeration to say that every day, as new clubs open, old ones are closer to going broke. Although the industry is still in the early stages of development, it has seen the first round of reshuffling,” a person in charge of a renowned LARP club chain surnamed Jiang, told Newschina.
“About 20 clubs have already contacted us about taking them over... If the number of customers doesn't increase a lot in the next few months, more clubs will suffer financial strain and end up going broke,” he said.
Two years ago, Zhou Jianrui, a purchasing manager at Beijingbased tech company Bytedance, published an industry analysis on Zhihu, China's equivalent to Quora, describing LARP studios as a “big pit” for business startups.
“I don't think startups can make good profits in this industry. Even though some of them become industry leaders, they have to spend huge amounts of money on [exclusive] copyrights of scripts or IP... I think the industry will finally go the way of livestreaming platforms and be controlled by capital moguls,” he wrote.