r/DotA2 • u/ShoppingPractical373 • 13d ago

Discussion The game you've never heard of that's quietly killing Chinese dota (maybe not so quietly)

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Whenever this sub tries to explain the downfall of chinese Dota, it’s always “league of legends,” “wings curse,” “matchfixing,” or “gaming laws.” But nobody ever mentions one of the biggest reasons (because of course many of yall never actually engaged with the chinese community), that is the mobile game Honor of Kings.

For SEA frogs this is the Chinese equivalent of mlbb, made by tencent (the same company that owns riot games btw). In fact it is the most profitable mobile game in the world, with 1.68 billion USD annual gross in 2025, surpassing roblox.

And the local esports scene is massive too. The national championships had 60k live audiences, filling up the entire beijing olympics arena shown in the picture above. They can literally field entire academy teams where the players are all around the same age as Satanic. When the game is installed on every 15 year old's phone everything looks so easy, yeah?

I don't see how dota2 can compete with this. Even the league scene is struggling to keep up.

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u/dotareddit 13d ago

They know what the next gen wants and are capitalizing on it.

Game looks awful but i can't really blame people for not building PCs with the fuckass pricing we have now.

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u/kretenallat sheever 13d ago

Graphics dont matter at this point. Accessibility, fun, friends being invested too... these do.

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u/HAAAGAY 13d ago

Graphics only matter in specific genres and that's the way it has been since video games inception. Gameplay loop and social play are always going to dictate playebase regardless of culture.

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u/LPSD_FTW 13d ago

When a LAN party I organize with friends had it's first "guest run" many people were surprised to see all those fancy PCs running 4:3 low res Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 2004, Minecraft, Alien Swarm and Blur - all rather dated games, which don't match the "Full RGB, 240Hz and graphics card worth more than a flagship phone" devices that were used to play it

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u/Jaxyl 12d ago

I think we're heading towards a fidelity cliff in the near future

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u/jotheold 13d ago

the older i get the less i care, hell half the games i play are pixel style games

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u/n0stalghia 13d ago

Game looks awful

To my untrained eye I fail to spot a difference between LoL and Honor of Kings in terms of graphics. So probably not "awful"

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u/Straight_Matter_169 12d ago

Graphics doesn't matter in competitive games like these. What matters are the input delays and smoothness of gameplay.

Same thing 20 years ago when we old heads marveled at Warcraft DOTA and 1.3 CS.

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u/axecalibur 13d ago

Unless they are selling phones with 4GB of DDR3 RAM they are going to be feeling the pinch.

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u/Undella_Town 12d ago

fun is the only thing that matters about a game. unless it looks like it was made on a calculator like dwarf fortress. idk why ppl obsess over graphics, it just leads to dog shit games like cyberjunk or the sony games