Invictus Gaming’s Owner is Giving Away Thousands in Cash and Spawning Weird Hotdog Memes

Last week, Invictus Gaming (iG) became the first Chinese team to win a League of Legends Worlds title. That’s a pretty significant milestone for a country that is taking esports increasingly seriously, and it’s been widely celebrated in gaming circles in China.

Someone with particular reason to celebrate was team owner and backer Wang Sicong — whose father is the founder of property giant Dalian Wanda and one of the richest men in the world. But Wang has chosen to mark the team’s victory in a pretty unusual way: by giving away tens of thousands of RMB to fans.

Wang announced the move on social media, taking to the Twitter-like platform Weibo to reveal that he would be selecting 113 fans (to mark 11.3, the date iG won) to receive 10,000RMB each. He’s said he’ll be choosing the winners on 11.11, also known as Singles’ Day and that to qualify, all users have to do is forward, comment on, or “like” his post.

Unsurprisingly, it’s had a fair bit of “engagement” since:

Wang’s giveaway has been compared to Alibaba’s recent “lucky koi” promotion, which chose a seemingly random user of their payment program Alipay to be showered in gifts worth thousands of RMB:

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But that’s not the only reason Wang has been going viral lately. He’s also featuring in another “hot topic” on Weibo, which is basically a meme of him eating a hotdog after he was photographed doing just that at the League of Legends finals:

Some have said that as he was educated in the UK he should have better manners, which feels a little harsh — it’s a hotdog, they’re made to be demolished in this way surely? Wang himself took to Weibo to (seemingly in good humor) plead with users to stop spreading the photo around, which of course only resulted in more shares. And, weirdly, a range of “merchandise”.

A cartoon image of him really going to town on a hotdog has now reappeared on everything from an eyesight test chart to a hoodie to a series of computer game memes:

Sometimes the Chinese internet is a really odd place.

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