The internet cafe 2.0

0:00Discussion keeps the world turning. This is Roundtable. You're listening to Roundtable, I'm Feifei, together with Vouchen and Steve Hadley here in the studio. Coming up, in today's world, we carry the internet in our pockets. Yet, some are paying by the hour to sit in front of a computer again. Not because they need the web, but because home won't let them log off. The laundry stairs at you, work tests, bars at 10pm. The internet cafe, on this sense, isn't really selling connections. Again, and anymore, it's more on the some level selling these connections. And we are diving into why the business of internet cafe is booming in China. Our podcast listeners can find us around Table China or our podcast. You remember, you can always, sorry, remember we always want to hear from you. You can drop us an email or send a voice mode.

1:00We want them all. Send your thoughts to us and also with the rest of the world to Roundtable Podcast at qq.com. For many people, the internet cafe used to mean rows of computers, cigarette smoke, instant noodles, and an all night gaming session. Then came smartphones and home computers, and the whole industry of internet cafe seemed to be dying. From over 150,000 internet service venues in 2016, the number actually fell to just more than 70,000 by the end of 2023. That was a dramatic decline. But now, something unexpected is happening. The internet cafe is making a comeback, and some of the days' venues come with high and gaming equipment, private rooms, full meals, showers, laundry, and yes, even food massages. So why are young people returning to this place? They were supposed to have outgrown and past the internet cafe become something much

2:02bigger than a place to get online, actually, Stephen, you shouldn't as a millennial myself. I feel I have a lot of common with Gen Zers, actually, very surprisingly. Internet cafes, something I grew up with, you know, going to internet cafes with my friends for different reasons. But somehow, Gen Zers, today's young people are also going to these places. What the internet cafes that you are going to were totally different from nowadays, you know, walking into one of these new generation gaming cafe today, and you might have to double check the sign outside. They are like high-end gaming PCs, of course, powerful graphics cards, high refresh rate monitors, big screen premium keyboards, and mice, of course. Some venues even put an entire wall of gaming peripherals on display. So customers can try different equipment before deciding what they like, the different

3:03types of keyboards, different sounds of keyboards, different sizes, forms of mouse and mice. And instead of one giant room filled with computers, you might find single rooms or double rooms or private rooms for groups of friends, complete with sofas, beds, and lounge areas. And you can order food inside of this cafe, different buffets, or different types of drinks. They can just bring these food and drinks into your station. Oh, like your private rooms or your launch bars, I'm not sure if that's the right word. Could try to offer you the most luxurious service that you can get in these kind of me and her neck of a. Oh, it's amazing. I used to, me too, Fei-Fei. I used to go to internet cafes when I first moved to Korea, actually. And the reason we used to go there all the time, my best friend and I, is because at that time, there was no English television for us to watch if we were at home and we were

4:09new to the country so we were kind of unfamiliar with where to go and what to do. So after work, every night for a period of about, oh gosh, I don't know, six months, we would go and play video games. You know, one of the internet cafes. Oh, Diablo 2. But that, at that time. Do you know that game? No, sorry. She totally ignored me. I was reminded for today's, for this topic, I know nothing about gaming because even though I said I went to this internet cafe in, when I was a teenager around, around 2000, I went there for different reasons. Like I don't have a computer, for instance, in my dorm when I was in high school. So whenever I, whenever I need to download something, whenever I need some sort of entertainment watching television, for instance, watching some videos, for instance, chatting online, for instance, this is the place I would go to. I bet the reasons why young people are going to internet cafes would be vastly different. Yeah, well, I don't, I don't know if they would be vastly different because I think there,

5:12something is in common. So even though back in the day, you were going for, I don't know, a certain set of reasons, print out some files or just hang out, watch shows, and I was going to play a video game. But still, the shared thing there is that was a third space, right? That was a place that you could go that wasn't at your house and it wasn't at your school where you could just go and chill out and enjoy yourself and it was the same thing for me. I don't know, you should, what do you think? I mean, now, yes, you can, it's incredible. You can get a foot bath. You can eat at a buffet. You can wash and dry your clothes. You can sleep overnight. I mean, these are essentially hotels that are, so people can actually put an all-nighter for the gamers. 100% and then you can sleep in your own private room. But still, I think the reason for going is kind of perhaps the same, at least partly. Yeah, I think that is kind of a cultural thing.

6:14Back then, when we still have these kind of older or traditional internet cafes, my classmates, they used to, for example, they travel to another city, but they only want to just stay there for one night. They wouldn't go book a hotel because that's like a group of people traveling together. They will go to a internet cafe and book for a whole night appointment and then they will stay in that cafe. You kind of have to sit there for a whole night, maybe sleep on your desk, but now it is, I think they saw that kind of, that part of lifestyle and they offered you something with maybe, of course, a little bit more price, but it is selling the whole experience, the whole different experience of you can get. So, it's kind of also very different from the 2000 internet cafes we used to go to Steve, because I remembered when I don't, I didn't really like to go to these facilities

7:14when I was a teenager. I tried to avoid as much as possible because for one you smell, there are a lot of people eating instant noodles, smoking in there, and also it's very, very crowded. Everybody is sweating, shouting and hitting their keyboard and mice. Awesome. It's not awesome. It's not an ideal place to be for a 16 year old girl. Fair point. I mean, for today, from what you shouldn't describe, I haven't stepped into one of these venues in so long that on some level is cleaner, I will assume. Of course, they are considering these kind of demands and they're making like separate and private rooms for you. And the most common like internet cafe videos that I can see now is that everybody's in their own cubicles and you can order food, you can just turn on the computer, you can just enjoy that several hours of your internet time by yourself.

8:20So it also offers some privacy. Yes, that is, I think the most common scene now when you're going into the internet cafe. So you won't be sitting next to a very smiling guy. You don't have to be. Yeah, and hearing him yelling as he gave me that was basically how you're doing. You have to pay extra for that. And Steve, I want to check that. You mentioned that it is one of your regular spots when you move to South Korea. But is that something you grew up with in Canada? No, this kind of culture. I mean, they have internet cafes in Canada and America and other Western countries. And they also have these types of gaming cafes in Canada and America. I was looking before the show. I found a couple in Toronto, a couple in Vancouver. I checked America. New York City has one. Big cities. Yeah. But see, the thing about the big cities is that you have the population density there to support this type of business just like you would have in Beijing or Shanghai or Seoul.

9:26But if you go outside, then the places aren't as, aren't as popular and aren't as common to find. So we don't really grow up in Canada with that internet cafe culture where you go and you game. The gamers tend to play at home. And it was completely different. I think especially around the year 1998, 2000 till 2010, that I think basically you can find a certain internet cafe even in the smallest towns in China. Yeah. The kind of a real boom of internet cafes here in China began after 1998, driven by some different factors. Of course, China's official opening of internet to the public, the high cost of PCs. It is really expensive to buy like your private and personal computer at home. A decent computer can cost you around more than have a year of your salary of your parents. So the rise of multiplayer online games can like red alert, starcraft and later legend

10:32of mere early prices plummeted to 10 yuan and below making internet cafes accessible to younger students, even though some of them are not allowed to. And young workers and this was the kind of golden age of Chinese internet cafes people started to making it as part of their recreational life. Yeah. And also it carried sort of a bad reputation. Yeah. I used to be the cover for my friends who play a lot of CS online back in the days. How, how, how did you cover for them? They would group together and went to one of the internet cafes really close to where I live and they played in group for several hours and they will tell that they would tell their parents that they are starting with me at my place. But so when the parents called me, I'm alerted that they are looking for them. So I would go to those internet cafes downstairs and tell them maybe it's their time to go home. And I would also tell the parents, yes, they are with me.

11:34They are just maybe in the bathroom or getting some drinks downstairs. I really hope your daughter listens to Roundtable today. But so, so the parents didn't want students and children go to these places because this crowd is and smoking and dangerous. Unhealthy food, yes. Yeah, I would also got you into, you know, sort of addicted to gaming online gaming. That was the reputation of gaming online gaming at that time. Now, I think the reputation has changed really. Especially even to online gaming, we call them eSports in today's term. It's not online gaming anymore. Yeah, I think that's one of the big reasons that gaming in China has become much more than just playing a game at home, especially with the rapid growth of eSports. This is a whole industry that is creating a kind of a whole economy for its own. There is a 20-25 report on China's eSports industry. China's eSports industry generated more than 29 billion yuan in revenue in 2025.

12:39That's more than 6% year-on-year increase. And the number of eSports users exceeded 495 million. So there were also 142 major eSports competitions involving professional players and 18 more than previous years. So eSports is increasingly becoming a form of mainstream entertainment and even a kind of sports culture. We mentioned it before, like a whole lot of in a row of PCs in a hotel, that was also popular because of these kind of eSports. People were just book a hotel room with a lot of these PCs and they will stay there for a whole night and play computer games together because that is essentially the atmosphere and the vibe that people want when they're playing eSports that we want to team up and do that together. So the social part is something that hasn't changed?

13:39Yeah. I think to the connection to eSports, it's not like, well, the way I see it, it's like this. If you watch an Olympic athlete perform, that athlete will inspire other people to also take part in that sport. And now with the internet, you can watch pro gamers game. Like you can watch videos of them playing the video game. And that I think has inspired a lot of people to also want to play those types of games. They might never become professional gamers, just like you might never become that Olympic athlete. But still, it's kind of that shared experience. And then you do it with your friends. So you have that shared experience, shared interest type of thing. You have the competitive, fun, buddy, buddy, nature of it too. And now the internet cafes are upping their game to create a space that's almost unheard of in this type of industry, where you can go and have high quality food in a clean environment,

14:41have luxury service and sleep overnight and get a hot shower and a comfortable bed. That type of thing didn't even exist before. So I compare it a little bit to the to the saunas, right? Where I mean, you go to a sauna in China and it's like for a king. Yeah. You can play, book stores, events and you can library and even movie studios, my friend who lives in Chengdu, he texted me a couple of weeks ago and he said, Steve, have you been to a sauna in China yet? And I was laughing because I haven't, but I knew what he was talking about because we talked about it on roundtable. And I said, you had a good time. He said, I didn't even know this quality of sauna existed in the world. And a part of this services, another question that I have is one reason that internet cafe got his boom in around 2000s is because you should mention the home pieces weren't as popular and common before.

15:41But now we all have our smartphones. We can play games on our smartphones, on our own laptops and computers. Then what are the differences, what kind of different service apart from offering buffets, hours, laundry rooms, beds for you to sleep? What are the other sort of perks this kind of internet cafes are putting forward to attract young people, young gamers to come? I think at core, of course, it's about the device and the experience and performance of these computers can offer you. Of course, you're going to internet cafes and you're going there for their computers, right? So the hardware gap is one thing that people, of course, chasing for. The experience that you can get that is quite impossible for your affordable PC at home. That's one thing. Another is that the whole lifestyle or experience kind of thing is something that you can get. Maybe you will spend a whole day in that kind of internet cafe with your friends and

16:44maybe playing computer games is only one part of the whole experience. Another part is you can share a time together, you can talk, you can chat, you can enjoy the spa and sauna to get maybe not together, but just experience. Together would be a nice experience as well. And another service that I found can be very interesting is a lot of these, I won't call them internet cafes at this point, but they call themselves like eSports stores. They are also organizing events together, like competitions for gamers. And I had a red example in Sheening that was in Qinghai. They are one of the stores. They hosted amateur tournaments covering five districts and two counties in that city and attracting over 200 teams more than 1000 registered players. And the finals were held in one of their stores, drawing over 300 live spectators and also they are having like online live streaming of these tournaments.

17:47They also attracted more than 50,000 online views. So a lot of these eSports, they are not just offering nice buffets and services and massages. They are also sort of trying to establish themselves on some level to stand in the sphere of eSports. And another thing that I want to tap on to is really about, I think, the atmosphere on some level. Yeah, you can't replace that at home. You can't replicate that at home, I mean. Yeah, especially with your friends. It's the golden hour. I think when my friends recalled the days that we are treating our parents about, and we're studying, but actually we're playing games in the internet cafes, are the golden hours that we constantly recalled and share the experiences together. Yeah. And I think it's kind of the point that you're making is that that still exists no matter what the cafe looks like or what the services provided are.

18:49Because you're there with your friends in a place that is fun for you. You have the best equipment. These PC rooms are kind of like showcase events. For a lot of people, this could be like a try before you buy a show room too if you're thinking about getting that level of computer hardware. But you've got the best, right? These computers are amazing. They're capable of playing the best games in the world. So it's just the environment where you want to be when you're hanging out with your friends. So you should have this, I never played any sort of games before, actually, especially in recent years. So the difference is this hardware does it really matter between a very high and the most advanced screen, for instance, would offer to a home computer, the screen of a home computer? Definitely. Oh, faith. Sorry, it's very amateur question.

19:53I can give you an example of myself. After the today's discussion, I literally was thinking about going to an internet cafe and enjoy maybe the best graphic effect that I can get when I was playing Black Myth with a home, because I was playing on my computer, which is kind of a like affordable computer that you can only play with the lowest level of their graphic effect. But I just want to try it once that I can actually see how the snow was going under my foot and leaving that trace, because that is the shadows, shadows and lights. That is the fact that you can only get on these kind of highest performance computers. You might not pay attention to those little types of details. Never. Right. If you don't really care about it, then that's totally fair too. If you are impressed by that type of thing, these types of monitors and these types of high end computers really give you the best experience and speakers too.

20:57Yeah. So the sound experience too. Oh, with video games these days? Oh, yeah. The sound is just as fun as the game itself. So you can be as immersive as more in this kind of equipment with the best of hardware possible. It's like going to a nice movie theater. Also apparently, when we're talking about internet cafes, it's not only about revivals, I think it's an upgrade of more eSports venues. And that brings us to the end of today's roundtable. I'm Fifefe. Remember, you can find us on Apple Podcast by roundtable china. And I'll see you next time. Bye bye.