Honor of Kings grew its audience by 45% over two years. Paired with its context, that number becomes a story about geography, not momentum.
In 2025, Esports Charts recorded fewer than 100 million watch hours for Honor of Kings across the full year — compared to 735.9 million for League of Legends and 435.1 million for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. HoK is not competing with those titles numerically. It is growing from a low base, in specific places, with significant publisher investment behind it.
Where the audience actually is
Indonesia accounts for 34.9% of Honor of Kings viewership. That is a high concentration for a game positioning itself as a global challenger. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang pulls 97.8% of its watch hours from Southeast Asia, with Indonesia alone representing 63.5%. MLBB is a regional product. HoK’s numbers suggest it is moving in the same structural direction, not away from it.
The Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore round out the top markets. China, where the game originates, owns much of the remainder. The international audience, by which publishers typically mean Western Europe and North America, does not appear meaningfully in these figures.
Viewership geography and player geography tend to move together. A game watched primarily in Indonesia and the Philippines by fans who already play it on the same phone is not on the cusp of breaking through in markets that do not have that installed base. The audience exists where the game already lives.
The platform advantage mobile built
At the Esports World Cup 2026, Honor of Kings recorded 4.8 million watch hours — up 30.8% from 3.7 million the year before. League of Legends grew by the same percentage at EWC, from 18.2 million to 23.7 million. The rate is identical. The volume is not.
Artyom Odintsov, co-founder of Esports Charts, explained why mobile MOBAs grow differently from PC titles: national leagues running most of the year, in the viewer’s language, on the phone they already use to play. Mobile Legends now accounts for 61.6% of all esports watch hours on TikTok — a platform that PC esports has not meaningfully entered.
That is not a streaming preference. It is an infrastructure advantage. TikTok’s recommendation logic and embedded live content serve mobile gaming in ways Twitch does not replicate for it. A viewer in Jakarta does not need to find a stream. The content finds them. That dynamic compounds over time, and the audiences it builds are sticky — and bounded by the geography that makes the loop work in the first place.
The championship numbers reveal
In 2024, the League of Legends World Championship generated 2.2 times the watch hours of MLBB’s M6. By 2025, Worlds and the M7 World Championship finished within 0.65% of each other. The convergence is real. The gap that remains is the single-peak audience: League still draws a larger one-night viewership spike, while MLBB distributes its numbers across two flagship events and strong regional competition throughout the year.
Honor of Kings is not in this conversation yet. Its 2026 World Cup drew 783,318 peak viewers and close to 5 million watch hours. Those are meaningful numbers for a title still early in its international competitive history. They are not numbers that suggest imminent competition with the top two.
TiMi Studio is actively investing in marketing and event activity to build the international profile, and part of the growth is explained by that spending. The question that follows any sustained promotional effort: what does retention look like once the budget normalizes.
The ceiling question
Brazil is the only Western region with an officially recognized Honor of Kings league. North America and Western Europe are not watching. The conditions that built Southeast Asia into the center of mobile MOBA viewership — an embedded player base, TikTok-native distribution, year-round localized competition — do not transfer automatically to markets that have none of those things.
HoK’s 45% two-year growth is the only positive viewership trajectory among the four major MOBAs. It is also easier to grow a small number than a large one. Whether that growth represents a structural shift in the competitive landscape or a deepening of an already regional audience is the question the next two years will answer. The data, at this point, leans one way.
Lex Northbyte