Chances are you haven’t played the world’s #1 mobile game

You may play mobile games for hours each day, but you probably haven’t played or even heard about a little ol’ game called Honour of Kings.

Market research company SuperData research released the ten highest earning mobile games for the first half of 2017, revealing the Chinese MOBA mobile game is dominating the world charts.  And it hasn’t even been released internationally – yet.

Honour of Kings was developed in 2015 by Tencent, a large internet company in China with a predicted worth of HK $3.06 trillion (nearly half a trillion AUD).  If you haven’t heard of Honour of Kings before, you may recognise its larger cousin: League of Legends.  The game play of these two are very similar with Honour of Kings having a more simple design for mobile devices.

More than 200 million people play Honour of Kings, with 50 million playing per day. This game is so popular in China that were growing concerns of the addictive nature of the game and Tencent applied restrictions on the number of hours players under the age of 18 were allowed to play.  There is talk of an international release this year, and the title Strike of Kings has been released as a test in selected areas – including Batman as a playable character.

The top ten mobile games so far in 2017 are:

1. Honour of Kings
2. Fantasy Westward Journey
3. Clash of Clans
4. Dragon Chronicles
5. Clash Royale
6. Monster Strike
7. Game of War: Fire Age
8. Candy Crush Saga
9. Mobile Strike
10. Fate/Grand Order

(NB: this data is based on a single market research report and others may vary slightly)

Although strategic combat games comprise most of the top ten list, both the number one and two spots are taken by MOBA and MMORPG titles.  These two are both Chinese titles, showing the enormous gaming market in China compared to the rest of the world.  Fantasy Westward Journey is a MMORPG title by another Chinese giant NetEase.  This game has an active player count of 2.7 million with more than 100 million downloads.

It is clear that there is a lot of money in mobile games, and the success of many games in this genre are short lived.  For example, Pokémon GO dropped out of the top ten list in May 2017 (probably why you are seeing a lot of new additions to this game the last few months).

But for now perhaps you need to be preparing yourself for a major MOBA mobile gaming addiction.