Wanghzhe Rongyao, also known as Honor of Kings, a mobile MOBA only available in China, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. It has been developed by Tencent’s Timi Studios, which revealed today that the game has achieved 100 million average daily active users to date.
The game was released in November 2015 for Android and iOS. Timi has also worked with Activision to bring Call of Duty to mobile.
Honor of Kings has an interesting history. In 2015, Tencent approached Riot Games to port League of Legends to mobile. Riot allegedly declined and said that League’s gameplay can’t be replicated on mobile. This led Tencent to create a separate game, called Wangzhe Rongyao.
The game became an instant hit. Two years after its release, became the top-grossing game worldwide, according to Technode, which cites intelligence from App Annie.
Tencent later went on to develop an international adaptation of the popular MOBA. It was called Arena of Valor and was released in 2017. This game allegedly caused Riot’s and Tencent’s relationship to strain. Riot claimed that the game was copying League of Legends.
Riot later told Dot Esports that the situation around Arena of Valor “wasn’t great” but it “worked through it.”
Riot is also trying to capture the lucrative mobile game market after announcing League of Legends: Wild Rift last year. The game is currently in an open beta in select regions. It will be playable in most regions around the world by spring 2021. Contrary to what the company said earlier, Wild Rift has proved that League’s gameplay can be replicated on mobile.
Nonetheless, Honor of Kings continues to shatter records. The game also has a developed esports scene with its premier league, the Kings Pro League currently going on for its fall season in 2020. Earlier this year, the Honor of Kings World Champion Cup 2020 was played as a LAN event in Shanghai and Beijing. The tournament featured a prize pool of over $4.5 million, half of which was raised through crowdfunding, according to Liquipedia.
Published: Nov 1, 2020 10:23 pm