Esports hotels topped 10,000 in 2020 — by 2025 more than half had closed

Esports hotels appeared in second-tier Chinese cities like Zhengzhou and Xi'an around 2017: hotel rooms fitted with high-end gaming PCs and marketed to young gamers as cheaper and more comfortable than an all-night internet cafe. Chains like Yibo Esports Hotel launched in 2018 and rolled out nationally the following year. Opening one location typically cost roughly ¥3–5 million. The format spread fast — Henan province alone went from 121 such hotels in 2018 to 297 in 2019, and Hubei grew its count roughly twentyfold in two years.

By November 2020, esports-branded hotels nationwide topped 10,000, with the narrower category of dedicated 'professional' esports hotels reaching nearly 7,000 that year and growing to over 8,000 by mid-2021. Every new entrant chased the same young-gamer customer with the same pitch, splitting a finite market across thousands of near-identical hotels while equipment and electricity costs stayed fixed per room regardless of occupancy.

By May 2025, Chinese media reported that more than half of the country's esports hotels had closed. The survivors have largely repositioned as ordinary hotels that happen to have gaming PCs, competing on general lodging rather than the gamer niche that originally defined the format.