He Wants to Build a Mouse Made for Gamers, and His Edge Is the Countless Matches He's Won | 100 People With Ideas

From e-sports world champion to gaming-gear entrepreneur — a complete change of role.

How much does a mouse that sits right in the hand matter when you play games? Probably no one is better placed to answer than a professional player.

In the eyes of one professional player, a mouse built for gaming looks like this: to suit right-handed players, the right button should sit 1.5 millimeters higher than the left, so clicks come faster and more smoothly; the two sides should curve inward by about 7 millimeters, for a better grip; and because different games demand different mouse speed and accuracy, the feet on the bottom of the mouse should be matched in material to the mousepad below — which means, ideally, the mouse should come apart and go back together, so players can swap parts in and out…

These millimeter-level details are what Li Xiaofeng and his startup team worked out by trial and error. As CEO of Taidu, an e-sports peripherals startup, he is chiefly responsible for the design thinking behind the company's first product. He settled on a mouse, because it is the most basic, entry-level piece of gaming gear there is. Taidu's first mouse went on sale this July. Billed as China's first smart mouse, all 10,000 units in the presale sold out within a week.

Taidu's first mouse, with a dizzying list of specs

Li Xiaofeng once went by a far louder name: Sky. Ten years ago he won the Warcraft III title at the World Cyber Games (WCG), the top tournament in e-sports, defended it the next year, and went on to finish first or second in tournament after tournament.

That record may be what gives him the standing to say what kind of mouse e-sports players need. Last June, Li Xiaofeng announced his retirement and founded his own e-sports peripherals brand, Taidu. The name was meant from the start to state his attitude toward the business — Taidu sounds like the Chinese word for attitude. "We wanted to call it Attitude," Li Xiaofeng said, "but the industry and commerce bureau told us we couldn't register a name like that."

That attitude shows up in more than the fine points of the shell. Li Xiaofeng wanted the mouse to be smarter, too. Sensors inside it record a player's hand speed, precision, and glide path, and pass the numbers to an app the player can study to get better in matches. The app also lets you race friends, or even professional players, on hand speed — what they call making the product "social."

The mouse even carries a heart-rate sensor, an indirect read on the player's state of mind. The feature looks like overkill, but it comes out of the 2007 WCG final, where he lost his shot at a third straight title after his composure broke. He wants players to see through the mouse not only how they play, but how they hold their nerve.

He no longer competes, yet everything he does still looks like the work of a man lost in the game. "I'm a former professional e-sports player, and now a veteran of the e-sports industry," Li Xiaofeng said.

Li Xiaofeng was once China's greatest e-sports player, the first man of Chinese e-sports — a phrase that points at once to the Human race he played in Warcraft III and to what he won in competition.

But as the game aged, its graphics began to look dated and its play settled into fixed patterns. In 2013 it was dropped from the WCG lineup.

Two world championships made Li Xiaofeng's name known to gamers everywhere

That was not good news for Li Xiaofeng, and he knew it. A declining game meant fewer viewers and fewer tournaments; he needed another way out. He once considered turning professional at Texas Hold'em. "The kind you play online." He did not go down that road. "One reason was that the platform shut down — a fairly well-known one called FTP. The other main reason was that it doesn't have a good name; people think of gambling."

He also worked as team manager for WE, one of China's best-known squads, helping the players the way he would help friends. Having been through it himself, he pitched in wherever he could — setting up broadband, moving dorm rooms, odd jobs like that.

In his off hours he recorded game commentary videos and used them to advertise his own Taobao shop. He tried, in effect, nearly every route a retired professional takes. In an industry where players give up school to make their name young, the exits are few once the matches stop: become a manager inside the industry, or go into game livestreaming.

Many professionals — Wu Sheng 2009, Ruofeng, and others — moved into livestreaming or recorded video commentary, took some advertising deals, and gradually built their own Taobao shops. The better shops can turn over more than 10 million yuan a year. But Li Xiaofeng never thought that amounted to much. "It's a fan economy. Fans follow you, and the player uses videos to recommend them good stuff." He calls it a sideways way to make a living. "It won't necessarily last, and fans move on. A living like that can't go on forever. It isn't a real career."

Li Xiaofeng's own business began in July 2014, over a meal with two fellow Henan natives, Yang Pei and Wang Dong, at a Central Plains restaurant called Zhangguide. The three had known each other since their days as Henan's provincial StarCraft players. Wang Dong is now CEO of the startup Zhaogang.com; Yang Pei started an internet social-services venture in 2004 before moving into finance.

"That day we talked a lot about e-sports — teams, clubs, the e-sports industry, things like livestreaming and content. We also talked about e-sports equipment," said Yang Pei, who later became Li Xiaofeng's partner in founding Taidu.

Yang Pei and Li Xiaofeng went through many possible ventures in e-sports and settled on peripherals as the promising one. Yang Pei thought of e-sports as a sport, which led him to Nike. "Nike is to the sports industry what peripherals are to e-sports. When an industry grows, the hardware around it is bound to have room to grow."

Li Xiaofeng knew the industry better, and believed a maturing e-sports business would hand him his chance. The whole supply chain was filling out. On the game side, Dota 2, League of Legends, and StarCraft supplied the stage; clubs and teams at home were forming and expanding, banding together into leagues; livestreaming platforms like Douyu and Longzhu became the channel that carried e-sports to an audience, with the popular rooms drawing well over 100,000 viewers, sometimes several hundred thousand; and sponsors of hardware and software equipment put up the prize money for the big tournaments. When Li Xiaofeng won his world title, his team paid him a little over 20,000 yuan a month; today a merely decent player can make several hundred thousand a month, before endorsements and shop income.

"This industry can already supply more than ten thousand jobs, and several hundred thousand is possible." And his own future business would be one of those thousands of jobs: professional e-sports equipment.

As a former professional, Li Xiaofeng knew there was almost no computer hardware built for e-sports. The research that followed bore him out. From August 2014, he and Yang Pei spent more than a month touring the contract factories of big brands in Shenzhen.

"I went to look at their factories and found their equipment was badly out of date," Li Xiaofeng said. "Their designers were still using CRT monitors, about what I used more than a decade ago." Li Xiaofeng's family had little money when he was young, and a computer game would start stuttering after ten-odd minutes.

"And on top of that, they don't even play games," Li Xiaofeng added. There were already well-known gaming peripherals brands at home and abroad — Logitech, Razer — but they mostly chased higher specs on features that already existed. As Yang Pei put it: "No one who loves games has come out and built a brand. They don't know what players really need."

Making what players need became one of the founding principles of the Taidu brand. Taidu Technology was set up in September 2014. In the first round of hiring, a love of games ranked, alongside hardware skill itself, as the most important test. "The first question we ask anyone we hire is whether they play games, and which ones," Li Xiaofeng said. Besides hiring dedicated testers, they recruited a large group of players and Li Xiaofeng's fans online to give them feedback.

Gaming is part of the job, too.

The hardest part was still finding people. Li Xiaofeng brought the ideas and Yang Pei the market experience and the money, but turning ideas into hardware and finding suppliers was another matter. It took a full two months to find someone who understood the technology and loved games.

They found Yu Mengyao, now CTO of Taidu Technology. Yu Mengyao had been a champion in competitive overclocking and was head of R&D at Great Wall Computer before he turned thirty; he and Li Xiaofeng, too, had met at gaming tournaments. Once at Taidu, his job was to make sure Sky's ideas could actually be built. The sheer number of design demands gave him headaches; he jokes that it is a kind of torture.

Take the detachable shell. To match the mouse to whatever game a player was in and give the best possible experience, Li Xiaofeng wanted magnets to hold the pieces together. The magnets interfered with the sensors inside, so they had to switch to an inset design.

And to build the heart-rate feature just mentioned, they first threw out the kind of sensor used on treadmills, which needs steady, constant pressure — no hand stays fixed on one spot of a mouse through a game. The lens for the optical sensor could not be flat either, because of how the mouse had to feel in the hand. In the end they calculated the curve themselves and built their own mold for the lens.

All of it came from Li Xiaofeng's wish to design a genuinely professional e-sports mouse — a breakout hit. Of the long list of professional-grade specs and parts inside, Li Xiaofeng says he used the best in every category. He gathered the best technical components from the most celebrated mice of the major makers, added the smart design that records e-sports numbers, and piled on details aimed at what players feel when they play. The result was Taidu's first gaming mouse.

Li Xiaofeng's team at Taidu, all of them gamers.

By Yang Pei's account, a mouse like this costs more than 200 yuan to make. Plenty of Li Xiaofeng's fans said things like, "It's made by the Human Emperor — 300 or 400 yuan would be worth it," but a mouse cannot be sold to fans alone. Weighing what casual players will pay, and wanting to push the brand early on, they priced it at 299 yuan — about what a mid-tier domestic brand charges.

Set against the features advertised, the low price drew doubts. What worried players, many of them Li Xiaofeng's own fans, was whether the product would match the launch-event promises once it shipped in October. Li Xiaofeng says that what he and everyone at the company now do all day is watch product quality. He goes to the suppliers and factories in Shenzhen himself to check. "That's also why we still haven't opened a second round of presales. Getting the first 10,000 units right, in quantity and quality, takes all the energy we have."

These days Li Xiaofeng seldom plays. While preparing the launch he went almost a month without touching a game. Now, apart from the occasional offline event, the only time he plays is on his regular game livestream. For him that is a way to promote the company — he plugs his own brand during the stream, or, to put it another way, his showing up is itself the promotion.