‘Honor of Kings’ is China’s plan to eat up the Western video game market. At the moment it’s not going to be easy

I don’t know how many years I’ve been writing about technology and video games, but I know that I started at the gates of university and that I turn 30 in a month. Well, there is a name that has always, always, always been repeated when I have written about mobile video games, money and China: ‘Honor of Kings’. It’s not a game, it’s THE game. It is the smartphone game that generates the most money in the world and until now it has been exclusive to China.

Now it has made the leap to the rest of the world and yes, we have tried it and no, it is not going to be easy. However, it is a preview of what is to come and a sign of how willing China is to eat the market.

What is ‘Honor of Kings’? It is a MOBA like ‘League of Legends’ or ‘DOTA 2’, among many other proposals of the genre. Its proposal is eminently mobile and there are no plans to launch it on other platforms. As a MOBA, the mechanics are well known: two teams of five people compete to destroy the rival base. There are three lanes, each designed for a type of character, and each character has a role, a set of skills and equipment, and their own combos and synergies. Nothing out of the ordinary, a MOBA.

And it’s OK? We have been able to test it in both the beta and the final version available on Google Play and the App Store and the experience has been positive. The final version is much more stable than the beta and the game performance is good (especially when you finish downloading all the content packs, both optional and required).

‘Honor of Kings’ has no mystery, especially if we have already tried the honeys of MOBAs. For all intents and purposes, the gameplay is the same as ‘League of Legends: Wild Rift’ and ‘Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’, with the difference that item purchases can be made from the battlefield. There is no need to return to base other than to heal ourselves.

Outside of the game, it should be noted that it is localized into Latin American Spanish and that we have a very characteristic interface of games of Chinese origin: menus full of options, several sections and events with the most varied mechanics to unlock things, etc. If what we are looking for is a MOBA that works and is entertaining, it is an option to consider. In fact, it works extremely well and the performance is exquisite. The problem is that he starts with a lot of disadvantage.

Because? Mainly, because it has a repertoire of about 80 heroes of which we have zero units of prior information. He fandom from ‘League of Legends’ knows its characters, since they have a lore that Riot Games has been in charge of cultivating over the years both in the game and in series, comics, social networks, etc.

However, with ‘Honor of Kings’ we are going blind. What does Han Xin do? Is Yang Jian good? We all start from scratch and that can have its charm, you always like to have a fresh experience, but it also requires an additional effort on the part of the player who is already accustomed to the mechanics of ‘League of Legends’.

That, in a game so focused on meta control, synergies and mastering a character well, is important. Especially when the gameplay that ‘Honor of Kings’ offers us is essentially that of ‘League of Legends’. Now, to Caesar what’s Caesar’s: ‘Honor of Kings’ is a new experience and, as a MOBA, it’s a good one. Mind you, it hasn’t completely convinced me, but being a free game it doesn’t hurt to give it a try and try it for yourself.

In China it’s a rocket. And it is for a simple reason: it was the first MOBA with joysticks for mobile phones to be launched there. The story is much longer, but we can summarize it as Tencent approached Riot Games in 2015 (Riot has been owned by Tencent since 2011, by the way) to make a version of ‘LoL’ for mobile phones. Riot said no, so Tencent decided to do it on their own with characters based on Chinese folklore. To this we add a growing market of mobile gamers, a company with money for punishment like Tencent, a very good mobile adaptation, a very popular genre and voila‘Honor of Kings’ became a religion.

But is it so popular? If you are not sitting, I recommend that you sit down. According to AppMagic data, Honor of Kings generated a whopping $1.48 billion in global revenue in 2023 alone. How much did the second one generate? Around 1.1 billion dollars. For those curious, the second is ‘PUBG Mobile’ (published by Tencent subsidiary Level Infinite). In third place we have ‘Candy Crush Saga’ (985 million), then ‘Genshin Impact’ (944 million) and, finally, ‘Roblox’ (869 million). Yes, Roblox. Did you think that the game your 10-year-old nephews play on their parents’ cell phone was a small thing? Well you can see.

In terms of users, since its launch in 2015 it has managed to amass more than 146 million players with an average of about 100 million daily players, according to Tencent. It is a huge, huge figure, and the game was not available worldwide. Now it is and, although it won’t be easy to find a place for itself with ‘League of Legends’ there, it has the weapons.

China is stepping on the accelerator. Be that as it may, and at the expense of seeing how ‘Honor of Kings’ does in a market other than the local one, the reality is that China is stepping on the accelerator to take over the Western market. It is doing this by releasing free games, compatible with practically all platforms and of very good quality in genres that either have not had a great exponent or are not going through their best moment. There are several examples.

There wasn’t a dungeon crawler like ‘Diablo’ on mobile, so NetEase published ‘Diablo Inmortal’. After the success of ‘Pokémon GO’ and ‘League of Legends: Wild Rift’, TiMi Studios (a subsidiary of Tencent) launched ‘Pokemon Unite’. Isn’t there a major shooter on mobile? TiMI Studios launches ‘Call of Duty: Mobile’. Do people want a mobile version of ‘Age of Empires’? No problem, TiMi Studios announces ‘Age of Empires: Mobile’, a game that will be published by Level Infinite, which is, guess what, a subsidiary of Tencent.

But there is more. ‘World of Warcraft’, the MMORPG par excellence, disappeared from China for a year. Well, now it has ‘Tarisland’ as a rival, which is known as ‘Chinese WoW’ and which is, indeed, free and compatible with PC and mobile and is also available worldwide. It has been published in the West by Level Infinite.

And it is not the only game published by this company. ‘Dune: Awakening’, developed by Funcom but published by Level Infinite, will arrive soon; and now that ‘Battlefield’ is in the doldrums, that ‘Call of Duty’ is not going through its best moment and that there is room for a more tactical and realistic shooter, TiMi Studios arrives with ‘Delta Force: Hawk Ops’, a shooter with A spectacular look that will be free to play and can be played on mobile phones, PCs and consoles.

“I just play ‘Fortnite and ‘Clash of Clans.'” Very good Jose Juan, both Epic Games and Supercell are also partly owned by Tencent.

China is clear: mobile. China is one of the largest video game markets. To give some figures, in 2022 the Chinese video game market (PC, consoles and mobile phones) generated 45.5 billion dollars in revenue and is expected to exceed 57 billion dollars by 2027. Of that $45.5 billion, $30.1 billion came from mobile gamers. Chinese companies represent 47% of the revenue generated by mobile games worldwide and, domestically, there is a duopoly (Tencent and NetEase) that accounts for 61% of the revenue generated by mobile games in China.

That’s why Chinese mobile games perform so well, because they are optimized to work on the devices that everyone has in their pocket. Not everyone has a 2,000 euro gaming PC, but everyone has a smartphone. If the game performs well on mobile, much of the road has already been covered.

The case of Europe. The latest report on the state of the European video game industry (from 2022, here in PDF) determines that 68% of people play on mobile phones, 58% on consoles and 48% on PC. The thing is that the most popular genres on mobile are puzzles, trivia and word games. The most conventional genres, such as adventure, action or sports, are played on consoles and PC.

In summary. A flood of games of Chinese origin is coming. Not that this is bad, far from it, especially if the games are good, but it could be a wake-up call for the European and American industry. The arrival of ‘Honor of Kings’ is not the first step, but it does represent an important incursion. The seed has already been planted, now it’s just a matter of time.

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