“Honor of Kings had its biggest year yet”: As HoK grows outside of China, the PC vs. mobile MOBA clash is heating up

It’s easy to know that League of Legends, with its immense history and popularity, is the most watched MOBA in the world. In 2025 alone, more than 735.9 million watch hours of League of Legends content were viewed by fans, according to Esports Charts.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, League’s mobile cousin, ranked second in MOBA with 435.1 million watch hours. 

Honor of Kings, another mobile MOBA, is fourth, trailing behind the top two and MOBA staple DOTA 2 in the watch hour rankings. Even though it trails massively behind the other three games (Honor of Kings has failed to crack the 100 million watch hour mark), it is receiving a bit of buzz recently.

“2025 was a record year specifically for the mobile MOBAs,” Esports Charts co-founder and CEO Artyom Odintsov told Esports Insider. “Both MLBB’s M7 World Championship and the Honor of Kings World Cup hit new all-time highs in hours watched and peak viewers, while League’s last all-time record was set back in 2024, and Dota 2’s in 2021.”

League of Legends and DOTA 2’s global viewership is well known in the esports space, while Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has a strong viewership in Southeast Asia.

So, where are Honor of Kings fans coming from? Well, if you thought China – where the game is from and where it takes much of its lore – you’d guess right. But it isn’t the only area that’s watching.

In a broad sense, Southeast Asia is by all accounts the home of mobile MOBAs. 

While China owns much of the fan base for Honor of Kings, Indonesia remains one of the top markets for the title.

According to findings by Esports Charts, Indonesia accounts for 34.9 percent of the title’s viewership.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Honor of Kings’ MOBA sibling, is much more concentrated.

Esports Charts’ data revealed that 97.8 percent of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s watch hours in 2025 came solely from Southeast Asia. 

A deeper view of the title shows that Indonesia is the predominant country, with 63.5 percent of watch hours coming from the country.

The Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore are also among the top markets.

Odintsov credited the mobile games’ commitment to prioritizing constant, localized content over occasional global peaks. 

While League of Legends does similarly with its regions, the one area that mobile MOBAs have is an instant transition from viewer to player.

“Mobile MOBAs grew by being local and constant rather than global and occasional,” Odintsov said. “National leagues [run] most of the year in the viewer’s own language, on the phone they already play on. Mobile Legends now accounts for 61.6 percent of all esports watch hours on TikTok, a platform PC esports has barely entered.”

But at the Esports World Cup, the MOBAs were the start of the event, amassing record numbers.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang remains the most viewed title at the Esports World Cup. 

The game earned 50.3 million watch hours in 2025 but saw a 10 percent decline in 2026 (45.3 million watch hours).

League of Legends, meanwhile, grew from 18.2 million watch hours to 23.7 million watch hours from 2025 to 2026. DOTA 2 remained flat, going from 15.1 million watch hours to 15.1 million watch hours.

Honor of Kings was clearly fourth with 4.8 million watch hours in 2026, but the number is up 30.8 percent from the previous year (3.7 million).

Odintsov noted that Honor of Kings is still early in its international competitive, but he remains positive on the titles’ overall growth.

“Honor of Kings had its biggest year yet. Its 2026 World Cup broke its own all-time viewership record. League of Legends grew too, by 30.8 percent, just shy of HoK’s pace, but the context behind that growth is different,” he said. “HoK is still a young title on the international stage, and its publisher is actively investing in marketing and event activity to build that global audience, whereas League’s growth is coming from an already-established, mature ecosystem that doesn’t need the same push.”

Honor of Kings’ viewership numbers remain modest compared to the other three giants in the MOBA space. For example, at its peak, League of Legends amassed 753.9 million watch hours. Honor of Kings, for comparison, peaked at 16.4 million in 2025.

But of the four MOBAs, Honor of Kings remained the only title whose viewership has increased since 2024.

Mobile Legends lost roughly 9% of its viewing hours, while Dota 2 and League of Legends remained steady losing less than three percent. Honor of Kings’ audience has grown 45% in the last two years.

But how are the other international events performing, such as each respective game’s world championships?

Mobile gaming wasn’t always at the top of the viewership mountain, according to the Esports Charts data.

At one point, more than 5.1 million viewers watched Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu and DRX complete their Cinderella run in the finals of the 2022 League of Legends World Championships.

In total, the 2022 League of Legends World Championships accumulated 141.9 million watch hours.

The following year, the 2023 League of Legends World Championships increased its viewership by 3.5 percent, with a peak viewership of 6.4 million viewers. That same year, 4.2 million fans watched Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s M4 World Championship with 80.1 million watch hours.

Then, in a unique scheduling quirk, Moonton hosted the M5 World Championships later that year, increasing peak viewership by 5.1 million but a near 10 percent drop in watch hours (72.1 million). 

League continued its upward trend in 2024 with nearly 7 million peak viewers and an astonishing 190.1 million watch hours. Some of this could be credited to highly popular T1 playing China’s Bilibili Gaming. 

That same year, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang earned its highest number of watch hours for its M6 World Championship, with 85.6 million total watch hours and a peak audience of 4.1 million viewers.

The roof came down in 2025 for League of Legends when it saw a 29 percent decrease in watch hours for its World Championship.

Meanwhile, Mobile Legends increased its watch hours for its M7 World Championship to 135.6 million with a peak viewership of 5.7 million viewers. 

“MLBB’s M7 World Championship matched League’s Worlds 2025 almost exactly in total hours watched, but League still pulled a bigger single peak,” Odintsov said. “Audience size is converging; the one-night spectacle isn’t, yet.”

“League has one clear peak moment each year – Worlds,” Odintsov said. “MLBB spreads its biggest audiences across two flagship events, the Mid-Season Cup and the World Championship, plus regional leagues that draw serious numbers of their own. There’s no single ‘biggest moment,’ there are several.

Honor of Kings saw growth in its Honor of Kings Invitational Midseason to its Honor of Kings World Cup by 47.4 percent in watch hours, going from 2.5 million to 3.7 million hours. The number jumped again in 2026 when 783,318 viewers watched Honor of Kings’ 2026 World Cup for close to 5 million watch hours, as both the M8 World Championships and League of Legends World Championships have yet to be played.

Fans, regardless of where they’re coming from, are starting to notice. 

The gap between Mobile Legends and Honor of Kings’ viewership numbers is massive by comparison.

Given Mobile Legends’ small decline in numbers and Honor of Kings’ growth, it seems that Mobile Legends has capped, while the market share for Honor of Kings still has plenty of room to grow.

The interesting thing will be if mobile gaming ever takes off in the West – primarily Western Europe and North America. Brazil has a strong mobile player base and remains one of the few Western regions with an Honor of Kings and Mobile Legends officially recognized league.

Even so, Odintsov assessed that mobile gaming and PC gaming viewership will remain close, especially on the championship, international level.

“The clearest sign mobile and PC are converging is at the championship level,” he said. “In 2024, Worlds pulled in 2.2 times the hours watched of MLBB’s M6 World Championship. By 2025, that gap had all but vanished – Worlds 2025 and MLBB’s M7 World Championship finished within 0.65 percent of each other in hours watched.”

While the West doesn’t watch Honor of Kings – or even the more popular Mobile Legends – it is a proof of concept for the potential of mobile viewership.

The larger question is whether a game – mobile, PC, or console – in North America could match and rule viewership like Southeast Asia and China.

But that’s for another time.