More support is needed for talented Hong Kong gamers who often have to pay their own way to compete overseas, said the founding president of the Esports Association of Hong Kong, China on Friday. Eric Yeung made the comment after 16-year-old Cheng Yip-kai took home the city's first Pokémon GO world championship title after booking his own trip to Hawaii. "Right now unfortunately, most of the games are commercially running for those competitions, rather than [falling] within the traditional sports framework," he told RTHK's Backchat programme. "So I think it's a bit difficult [using] the traditional funding way to fund them and to support them to go to compete [against] others internationally." Yeung also said Esports can be integrated with other industries to drive growth, noting the lack of a professional league and competitions in the SAR. "Esports itself is not a standalone industry. But rather, in Hong Kong we could work closely together with the innovation and technology industry as well as the traditional sport industry in order to groom a better result for the Esports industry," he said. Meanwhile, Yeung said the success of blockbuster game "Wukong" - or "Monkey King" - marked a milestone for China's Esports. The game, based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, is the first triple-A video game in the country's history. "The major difference [between] those AAA games and those traditional Esports games is the investment. When we are talking about the AAA level games, it's like shooting a movie - we're talking about maybe even hundreds of millions dollars of investment for a single game," Yeung said. "The investment for a traditional mobile game is much lower."
