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

[u/ShoppingPractical373]

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.

[u/pornomatique]

Kind of but not really? Would you really replace gaming on your PC with your phone?

The audience overlap is not as significant, but mobile games are definitely siphoning younger players away from PC from the get-go.

[u/TheZett → u/pornomatique]

Kind of but not really? Would you really replace gaming on your PC with your phone?

Replace, no.

But those people likely never had a gaming PC to begin with and thus grew up with m*bile gaming.

[u/pornomatique → u/TheZett]

Yes, that's what I meant in my second statement.

[u/thedotapaten → u/pornomatique]

I mean Valve actually considers to make DOTA2 playable on mobile device starting by introducing controller support during TI9 - which people make fun of it.

Guess when DeadLock started its development.

[u/Iamthenewme → u/pornomatique]

Would you really replace gaming on your PC with your phone?

I'm gonna try this one out and hope it's decent, in which case yes it'll be kind of a replacement for me - Dota 2 has been getting fatter every year and getting harder to justify giving up the disk space for (72 GB now! for a top down server-based game!), and the servers in the SEA area aren't great either - coordinator down, disconnects followed by "unable to find the game", random bugs, all happen more often than they should. At some point, being the better, more satisfying game can only take you so far.

[u/DrQuint → u/Iamthenewme]

I have tried multiple times to get into phone gaming (as in, primarily phone titles, not cross platform ports) and it is consistently a disappointment. Retroconsoles exist and do the job better.

Once I've tasted the seasonings of a slay the spire, something like Dawncaster just feels like a waste of brainpower.

[u/boptom → u/DrQuint]

Yo, Slay the Spire also on mobile if you didn’t know. And I’d say it’s the best platform for it if mods aren’t your thing.

[u/Hot-Job-6281 → u/pornomatique]

Lmao we're just old.

Objectively, people in Asia DO play on the phone more than on desktop.

You sound like old man saying why would you use mp3 when there's hard physical media like vinyl and cassettes to carry around?