Cover Danny Tang, co-founder and CEO of Hero Esports, speaking at the LEAP East tech conference in Hong Kong (Photo: courtesy of Hero Esports)
Danny Tang, co-founder and CEO of Hero Esports, speaking at the LEAP East tech conference in Hong Kong (Photo: courtesy of Hero Esports)
1 / 1
The head of Asia’s largest esports provider argues that no technology can replace the charge of a stadium—and she’s designing tournaments to prove it
Danny Tang’s favourite moments at her own tournaments are the ones where she steps back. Each time the stadium fills in anticipation of the opening, the co-founder and chief executive of Hero Esports enjoys finding a far corner of the venue to observe tens of thousands of people react to the same moments—“in the same rhythm,” as she puts it.
“Whether you’re extremely happy or proud, or you’re quite upset, you’re taken aback,” she says, “there’s a sense of connectedness that we’re not alone in this experience.”
Tang is far from alone. The company she now leads—rebranded from VSPO to Hero Esports in 2024, when she moved from chief financial officer to chief executive—has become Asia’s largest esports experience provider, reportedly organising over 7,000 esports competitions annually across 20 competitive titles, including Honour of Kings, Game for Peace, and League of Legends.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s AI, or the metaverse we talked about a couple of years ago,” she told Tatler on the sidelines of the LEAP East conference in July. “At the end of the day, we are still flesh and blood. We have emotions, and that’s a core part of who we are. How do we encourage emotional connections in our experiences and products?”
Read more: Tomorrowland lands in Shanghai: what to expect from the music festival’s Asian debut in November
An unlikely champion
Tang is a curious figure to lead competitive gaming. A mathematics and economics graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she began her career at asset management giant KKR before moving to CDB Capital, the investment arm of China Development Bank. Tang joined the gaming industry in 2016 when her co-founder, Dino Ying, called her about what she remembers as “this crazy idea called esports.”
“To this day, I’m still probably the worst gamer in the organisation,” she says. “I’m not here because I’m obsessed with gaming and I’m a super great gamer. On the contrary, I love building the experiences and content for people.”
Since 2022, Hero Esports has endured what academics and industry watchers called the “esports winter”: funding retreated and established teams folded as pandemic-era valuations collapsed. In 2023, Hero Esports received a US$265 million investment from the Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF); later that year, Hero Esports (then known as VSPO) started co-organising non-gaming events with INS Land, a music and entertainment complex co-founded by Ying in Shanghai.
Tang stresses that she’s tapped into broad appeal beyond gaming. “Our goal is to create meaningful experiences and content that connect people, both online and offline, and that doesn’t mean just the hardcore esports fans,” she says. “We want everybody to come to our tournaments and events to have a great time.”
Engineering a shared moment
The audiences Tang designs for are not specialists. According to a white paper published in June by Hero Esports, ESL FACEIT Group and Niko Partners—the first two share an owner in Savvy Games Group—roughly 3.6 billion people worldwide play video games. “When you have half of the world playing,” Tang says, “it’s not just a niche thing.”
Hero Esports’ productions are built to be accessible for newcomers and structured more like concerts or movies. For one, while gamers are playing, in-game camera directors zoom in on specific players’ actions to construct narratives, much like actual film directors. Separately, theme songs keep the same rhythm in every host city while absorbing local textures. “When we go to Beijing, there is a little bit of Beijing opera,” she says.
"We use a lot of virtual production elements, like characters, animations, things that are familiar to their day-to-day playing experience, so that [the audience] can instantly find that sense of familiarity and community,” Tang adds.
One of Hero Esports’ crowning achievements came in April 2025, when tickets to the grand finals of the King Pro League (KPL), the professional league for Honour of Kings, sold out in 12 seconds, according to the company. Later, in November, more than 62,000 fans filled Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium—a venue that has hosted both Summer and Winter Olympic ceremonies—setting a Guinness World Record for the largest attendance at an esports match. Tickets to Hero Esports finals sell out faster each time, and capacity, Tang concedes, is a constraint the company is working to address. (Hero Esports has not publicly disclosed its latest revenues or profitability.)
Asked how a business measures and potentially monetises something as intangible as feeling, Tang resists the premise that her company manufactures happiness. “It’s almost creating an opportunity for them to enable them to feel whatever they want to feel,” she says. “You always have the winning team and the losing team. Not everybody is going to walk out happy.”
The long game
The stadium, in Tang’s account, is one of the few venues left where a large crowd is looking at the same thing. “A lot of people talk to ChatGPT when they feel sad, instead of talking with their friends,” she says. “Even if you and your best friend sit right next to each other, pulling up the same app, you will see a different version of the world depending on your past preferences.”
Nor does she treat the next generation as a lost audience. “My eight-year-old could go on for hours about the cities that he’s building in Minecraft,” says Tang, a mother of two. Formats change; the urge to make and connect, she argues, does not.
“You can read all the white papers in the world, you can read all the stats,” she says. “But nothing beats really being there in the stadium, feeling the vibe with 10,000 or 20,000 other people, just cheering for a team.”
NOW READ
Meet Grills Gaming, the all-women Dota 2 team breaking the glass ceiling in esports
3 women who changed the gaming community: Alodia Gosiengfiao-Quimbo, Kyedae, and Biancake
Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
