Honor of Kings to get a global release

Honor of Kings, one of the highest grossing mobile games of all time, is getting a worldwide release. Today, developer Level Infinite announced that it’s bringing Honor of Kings to the rest of the world and that invites to a closed beta would be coming soon.

If you’re having a bit of deja vu, do not be alarmed. The matrix is not glitching. Tencent, Honor of Kings’ publisher, has technically done this before when it released Arena of Valor — a westernized version of Honor of Kings — back in 2017.

Honor of Kings is a 5v5 multiplayer online battle arena (also known as MOBAs) similar to Riot’s League of Legends or Valve’s DOTA 2. In Honor of Kings, players can choose characters from Chinese mythology to build their teams, and the game has extensive social features like chat integration that uses popular Chinese social apps like QQ and WeChat. It’s not known if these features will be available in the worldwide release of Honor of Kings or if it’ll be replaced with apps more entrenched in the Western market like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

Mobile games are the most popular form of gaming in the world. Games like Call of Duty Mobile, Candy Crush, and PUBG Mobile rake in billions of dollars annually. Even in markets like the United States and Europe, where there’s an unfortunate stigma attached to mobile gaming, it still dominates the gaming revenue and download charts with breakout hits like Genshin Impact and, more recently, Diablo Immortal. That Tencent and TiMi Studio Group want to expand their reach with Honor of Kings in a climate that seems almost inexhaustibly hungry for new mobile games makes perfect sense.