Qingwen

» see iqing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I found Qingwen the way you find most dead Chinese startups from the outside, through the complaints people left behind after it closed. There is a Weibo post from a small game studio explaining that the publisher owes them money and that their released game no longer runs. The publisher was Qingwen, and the reason the game no longer runs is that Qingwen's servers are off.

The site opened in July 2015 as a community for original light novels and manga. Zhu Zhouyi, who had been chief executive of AcFun, left with several former colleagues and registered Wuhan Kongwen Network Technology in January of that year. The operating model was user-generated: readers wrote serials, the community voted with attention, and the company licensed paid foreign light novels and manga alongside the amateur work. You reached it at iqing.com on desktop, at m.iqing.com on a phone, or through the Android and iOS apps.

By 2018 it had grown a second product. The Qingwen IQA editor was a visual-novel engine, announced in Sina's comics section on 24 May 2018, aimed at letting writers on the site turn their serials into playable games without learning to code. Some of them did, and a handful of those games shipped commercially on mobile stores and on Steam. In June 2018 the site was ranked 16,405 globally by Alexa.

On 23 September 2019 Qingwen announced that it was closing and that the company was insolvent. The phrase in the notice was 资金链断裂, the funding chain has broken, which is the standard Chinese formulation for a startup that has run out of runway with payables still outstanding. Taiwanese coverage two days later ran it under a headline asking whether the N in ACGN, the novel, can ever actually be made to pay.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the money ~

Three rounds in three years, all of them from names that matter in Chinese online media. The angel came in September 2015, a few million yuan led by JiuHe Capital with Zhangqu Chuangxiang alongside. A year later the A round brought in tens of millions, led by Gaorong Capital and by Bilibili. The B round closed in April 2018 at roughly the same size, this time with iQiyi in front and the Wuhan Optics Valley talent fund following on.

The share register that came out of all this is worth reading as an artifact. Zhu Zhouyi held 34.05 percent of the company, iQiyi's Beijing entity held 6.82 percent, and Bilibili's Shanghai vehicle held 3.65 percent against total registered capital of 1,615,303 yuan. Seventeen months after the last round, the company was gone.

~ the apology ~

In May 2018 users pointed out that one of the licensed Japanese light novels Qingwen had brought over, 《在异世界开拓第二人生》, had a protagonist readable as a soldier of the Japanese army that invaded China, credited in the original text with the killing of three thousand people. Qingwen pulled the title and re-reviewed it. What the review found was that the translation source the author had supplied already had the contested passages cut out of it, and that the reviewer who approved the license had never read the original edition.

The company then published a statement saying it had ended its relationship with the author and was demanding an apology, and the apology came. The episode is a small window into how licensing worked at this scale in 2018, which is to say on trust and at speed.

~ what the servers took with them ~

Games made with the IQA engine needed to reach a Qingwen server to start. That was a licensing decision rather than a technical one, and it was fine right up until it was not. When the servers went dark in September 2019, every IQA game on the mobile stores and on Steam became unlaunchable, including the ones that customers had paid for. Qingwen had been the publisher of record for several of them, and it went down owing the development teams money, which is where the Weibo posts come from.

The address still answers today. What it serves is a one-line document containing a single instruction to redirect the browser to a parking page, which is what a lapsed domain looks like once a registrar has picked it up.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »