The international version of Honor of Kings, which is developed by Tencent, was officially launched in 2024. As of July 2024, the global cumulative registered users of Honor of Kings have exceeded 50 million124. However, there is no specific data available regarding the number of Chinese players of Honor of Kings. Here are some relevant analyses:
Reasons for the Inability to Accurately Count the Number of Chinese Players
Complex User Group: Chinese players of Honor of Kings mainly include overseas Chinese and students studying abroad12. There is no unified platform to count the number of these players, and their distribution is scattered across various countries and regions. Besides, domestic players can also use QQ or WeChat to log in to the international version11. It is difficult to distinguish domestic and overseas players accurately.
Cross - border Gaming: Due to the global release of Honor of Kings, players can freely choose to play on different servers124. Chinese players may play on international servers, while players from other countries may also play on servers where Chinese players are concentrated. This cross - border gaming behavior makes it difficult to accurately count the number of Chinese players.
The appearance of the international version of Honor of Kings, to put it bluntly, is aimed at making money from overseas students. Anyone who has stayed abroad knows that foreigners seldom play games, especially mobile games. It's completely different from the current situation of domestic teenagers who can play mobile games all day long. Foreigners would never waste their time on mobile games. Honor of Kings has indeed made a lot of money in China. But the moment it reached out overseas, the game was basically doomed. I actually played it a few times. There was indeed no latency, but the movement and skill release were always lagging, and it was even worse than playing the domestic server with an accelerator. The game environment was just so-so. Due to the influx of domestic server players, most people were stuck at the Platinum rank. What's more, I could even match with the same teammates and opponents several times, which indicates that there are really few people playing this game. Since the international server can match players from various countries, if you keep running into the same ones several times, it means that the player pool is extremely small.
