Behind the success of Tencent's Honour of Kings, a League of Legends-like mobile title launched in 2015, which became the first game in history to hit 100M DAUs
Josh Ye / South China Morning Post : Tweets: @scmpnews , @therealjoshye , and @zhugeex Tweets: @scmpnews : Before Honour of Kings became the world's most popular game, it was a desperate experiment https://www.scmp.com/... @therealjoshye : Did a profile piece on the 5-year-old Honor of Kings, Tencent's marquee game with 100M daily active users and a revenue of US$2.6 billion in 2020. But the truth is that it almost didn't make it as it almost lost to an internal rival project in 2015. 1/x https://www.scmp.com/... Daniel Ahmad / @zhugeex : Every time I tweet about Honor of Kings being the #1 game by global revenue I get a ton of questions asking “wtf is Honor of Kings” So here is a great article on the MOBA game for mobile from @SCMPTech, including quotes from myself: https://www.scmp.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The SCMP profile fills in the origin behind numbers the corpus has been tracking for years: Tencent launched Honour of Kings in 2015 as a League of Legends-style mobile MOBA, and it nearly lost an internal bake-off against a rival project before becoming the first game in history to reach 100M DAUs — the milestone Tencent confirmed in its own record announcement, alongside an unusually balanced player base of roughly 50% women.
That scale explains the financial arc around it: the game drove US$2.6B in 2020 revenue within TiMi Studios' $10B studio year, and later became the first mobile game to clear $10B lifetime. What began as a desperate experiment now anchors Tencent's export strategy, including the reported Western European and US rollout from 2017.
First-order effects
- Tencent's internal-tournament development model — where competing in-house projects fight for survival — gets its flagship proof, since Honour of Kings only won after nearly losing to a rival team in 2015.
- TiMi Studios holds both a 100M-DAU franchise and Call of Duty Mobile, concentrating Tencent's mobile gaming revenue engine in one studio.
Second-order effects
- With domestic saturation reached, Tencent pushes the franchise outward — the reported launches in the US, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany test whether a Chinese-market MOBA can travel.
- PUBG Mobile sits alongside it atop Sensor Tower's earnings rankings, meaning Tencent's own titles compete with each other for the world's most lucrative mobile game slot.
Third-order effects
- If parallel internal bets keep producing category-defining hits, big-platform game development consolidates around a few mega-franchises funded by tournament-style studio structures rather than single greenlights.
The trend: Mobile gaming is consolidating around a small set of billion-user franchises built by studios willing to fund competing internal projects until one breaks out.