Yubin Ng and the business of coming back

In 2026, Yubin Ng announced that eGG Network was coming back. It was a business decision with an unusually personal history. The gaming network had helped teach him the media trade; by the time he returned to it, he was running MantaYaY, a company working across creators, production and commerce. He had spent the intervening years learning how people gather around a screen, and how difficult it is to turn that gathering into a business.

A founder buying into a familiar name makes an appealing plot. Ng’s career has several less tidy, more revealing chapters: a mathematics and computing degree, a virtual pop star, a TikTok creator who accumulated followers at startling speed, and a recruitment exercise in which every offer was refused. Together, they describe the work behind the cheerful phrase “creator economy”. Someone still has to organise the economy.

A degree, then an education

Ng studied Joint Mathematics and Computing at Imperial College London between 2012 and 2015 on a full corporate scholarship. One student project investigated the Verhulst process and Mandelbrot set using Matlab. These are rather different objects of attention from a TikTok drama. Both, however, reward looking closely at what happens next.

His professional education came through Astro. Ng has credited the company with teaching him his trade and shaping his career after graduation. The distinction matters to his account of himself: university provided a qualification, while the media business supplied people, responsibilities and practical experience. An opportunity had consequences well beyond the tuition bill.

That early work also put him close to gaming audiences. These were communities with their own personalities and points of reference, rather than a conveniently blank advertising surface. Years later, his public reflections on eGG would retain a strong sense of belonging to that world. Gaming was a personal interest before it became a business proposition.

The audience had already logged on

By December 2017, Ng was Head of Tamago, the live-streaming platform launched by Astro and China’s Huomao. Its early offering brought together social personalities, entertainment and esports. One launch attraction was a live stream of Hatsune Miku Expo in Malaysia. A virtual singer was helping introduce a platform built around real-time attention. Media has never lacked a sense of humour.

The promise was simple enough for a fan: a concert could reach someone who could not attend it. Behind that convenience sat partnerships, rights, technology and production. Ng’s involvement placed him at the meeting point of those arrangements. Before a creator could make an apparently effortless appearance on a phone, several other people had work to do.

In 2018, Team Tamago extended that work into competitive gaming. The platform was then reporting more than a million monthly active users within six months of launch, across Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Ng described recognition and interaction with fans as practical opportunities for aspiring players. Playing well and being watched were becoming connected parts of a career.

The following year, eGG Network’s Alliance of Campus Esports launched a job portal with the Malaysian Youth Community. Its opportunities extended into development, events, marketing, communications, production and technology. Ng spoke about helping students encounter the breadth of the industry. The player in the spotlight was surrounded by possible professions.

The campus initiative also included a free online curriculum, with five levels and a certificate on completion. Taken together, the lessons and vacancies offered students two practical ways into esports: learning about its work and finding someone who needed it done. Event management or production might be a less obvious ambition than becoming a player. Putting those jobs in front of an interested student made the industry easier to see in full. Ng was already discussing gaming as a place to build a working life.

What happens after a million followers?

Joel Lim Min Sheu, known online as Bang Joel, supplied an unusually clear example of an audience arriving quickly. He has described reaching a million TikTok followers in 64 days. Ng spotted the channel’s potential, and Lim joined MantaYaY as a partner and director in 2023. Their collaboration paired Ng’s media experience with Lim’s experience of building a creator audience.

The plans were already broader than arranging brand appearances. At MantaYaY’s second TikTok awards dinner, the company announced Clan War, an interactive live-streaming game, and a hundred-episode vertical drama project called Jewel. Creators could be hosts, participants or performers. A following might support several kinds of work, provided somebody could assemble the right project around it.

That last condition is where Ng’s role becomes interesting. Lim’s rapid following was visible; deciding what to build around it required another kind of judgment. MantaYaY’s early public descriptions emphasised helping creators earn through partnerships and live streaming. The business had to connect audience interest with a commercial arrangement that could keep producing opportunities.

The drama learned to stand upright

By January 2024, the company had launched Di Sebalik Permata, a hundred-episode Malay drama on TikTok. Ng later reported that it reached 18 million Malaysians and collected 70 million views. Those were his figures, and the project formed part of his argument that advertisers should take vertical storytelling seriously. A phone could accommodate a continuing story, rather than merely a passing clip.

Terpaling Menantu followed among the company’s drama projects. In his review of 2024, Ng described further series planned for 2025, including Chinese New Year and Raya releases. The calendar was recognisably that of a media producer: occasions, audiences and a succession of programmes. The distribution surface had changed; the need to give people something to anticipate remained.

A hundred episodes also impose a useful discipline on the idea of creativity. Someone has to finish episode two. Then episode three. A company committing to a series takes on continuity, production and delivery as well as the pleasure of an initial idea. For a founder with experience in broadcasting and live streams, that workload belongs in the story alongside the viewing figures.

Ng’s public speaking has returned to the need to understand the platform and keep improving the content for it. The move from horizontal to vertical viewing makes the point almost comically literal. Even the frame demands a decision. An audience holding a phone has little obligation to accommodate a producer’s old habits.

The unglamorous side of the feed

Ng’s recruitment posts give this media business a more ordinary texture. He has advertised for finance and administration staff, video editors, planners, producers and people to work on TikTok commerce. The list is a useful corrective to the temptation to imagine a creator company as a few charismatic people and excellent lighting. There are accounts to manage.

In September 2025, he described a particularly awkward hiring exercise. Roughly fifty face-to-face interviews over two months had produced three HR offers, all declined. The salary increases he set out had seemed competitive to him. Candidates’ choices prompted him to question whether pay alone could make the opportunity attractive.

It was an unusually candid glimpse of a founder confronting another audience: prospective colleagues. They had preferences about working arrangements, benefits and the lives a job would allow them to lead. Ng also made his own expectations around accountability and performance explicit. The exchange exposed a negotiation that growth announcements tend to leave out.

Earlier that year, Ng and Lim had discussed MantaYaY’s business model, monetisation and expansion ambitions in a 39-minute radio conversation. Its range of activities ran from talent management to production and ecommerce. The hiring list helps explain what that range means inside a company. Each new line of business brings another set of tasks that must actually get done.

Giving the next person a start

Ng’s account of his scholarship eventually became an offer to someone else. In March 2025, he proposed covering an eligible computing graduate’s tuition, subject to a RM1 million cap, and providing personal mentorship. The arrangement involved working in Kuala Lumpur after graduation. It was an offer with professional expectations attached.

“it's now my turn to pay it forward.”Yubin Ng, March 2025

That proposal connects neatly with the campus careers work of his earlier years. Both concern entry into an industry whose visible jobs can obscure the routes behind them. A graduate needs a first assignment and someone prepared to teach. Ng’s own recollection gives that second part considerable weight. He remembers what an employer helped him learn.

An old name, another assignment

MantaYaY announced its first institutional investment in November 2025, a US$5 million round led by Kairous Capital. The stated plans included regional expansion and further development of its content and commerce operations. For Ng, that placed another set of obligations beside the creative ones: deploying capital, building teams and delivering for partners.

Then came the return to eGG. In April 2026, Ng announced the acquisition opportunity and described a future spanning gaming, technology and anime communities. By July, he was posting about live Dota 2 tournaments returning to the network. The familiar name was beginning to carry programming again.

There is affection in that return, but affection leaves a substantial working week ahead. Ng now brings experience from several sides of the screen: the platform, the creator, the advertiser and the production company. eGG gives those lessons a familiar place to meet. The next episode of his career has an old title. The work of making people come back begins again.