Honor of Kings (HoK). Which game has the most players?
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Scale of popularity:
- in November 2020, the number of daily active users was exceeding 100 million;
- the highest-grossing mobile game in 2022 – over $2.2 billion in revenue (source).
In 2015, Tencent proposed to Riot Games to create a mobile version of League of Legends. Riot's owners refused, believing that the gameplay of the hit MOB could not be successfully ported to smartphones. Undeterred by this, Tencent decided to create a game of this type on their own, putting TiMi Studios to work on it. The result of these attempts, Honor of Kings, forced the LoL developers to admit their mistake and announce 2019's League of Legends: Wild Rift. Developed (how else!) for mobile platforms.
Using the traditional rules of the genre and allowing players to take on the role of a range of historical and mythological Chinese warriors, Honor of Kings managed to attract 200 million people in less than a year since its late 2015 release, with as many as 50 million logging in daily. These numbers are even more impressive when you consider that the title was only available in China at the time. Boasting over 160 million monthly active players in 2017, Honor of Kings proved to be the highest earning mobile game in the world, and in February 2019, Tencent's revenue from this production alone surpassed $1 billion.
An extremely important event in the history of the game took place in November 2020. The daily number of active players then exceeded 100 million.
Quite quickly, an attempt was made to export Honor of Kings to other countries. The version of the game available outside of China is titled Arena of Valor and instead of characters inspired by Chinese folklore, it offers characters known from myths and historical events typical of the country. It doesn't match the popularity of the original, but it's also doing quite well and gaining more recognition every year - in September 2018, it was revealed that Arena of Valor has already earned $140 million.
