Honor of Kings is the China-based MOBA game that is extremely famous in the country. The success of this game is incomparable to any other mobile game in the genre and it has set many records till date.
By 2017, Honor of Kings had over 80 million daily active players and 200 million monthly active players but the game has broken its own records to reach a landmark of 100 million active users for the first time in five years.
Honor of Kings is a multiplayer MOBA game developed by Tencent’s TiMi Studios and the game recently completed five years successfully.
On the occasion of this five year anniversary, Tencent released some information that revealed many landmarks of the game, most significant one being the daily active users landmark.
Honor of Kings became immensely popular in China right from the launch and owing to this success, the game was released globally under the name of Arena of Valor in 2017. Tencent first approached Riot Games in 2015 with the hopes of recreating the mobile version of their famous title League of Legends.
They were turned down by Riot with the claims that the “gameplay could not be replicated on smartphones”, after which Tencent created their own game which was launched under the name of Honor of Kings.
Riot later announced their own project named as League of Legends: Wild Rift, which is LOL on mobile and console devices. This game is currently undergoing open beta testing in the SEA region.
On the special anniversary event, Tencent also announced that they will be launching an officially licensed Bruce Lee skin to celebrate their success story of five years. Honor of Kings is a major title in China and the is always on the top of the charts of monthly player spending data released by SensorTower. The global version of this game also has a large esports ecosystem based in the SEA region.
Looking at the success story of this game, the interpretation of mobile MOBA games in China is basically Honor of Kings till date but things can take a different turn in the upcoming years. League of Legends is a very popular title in the country and the upcoming Wild Rift can potentially topple these kings to claim the throne.
