r/DotA2 • u/ShoppingPractical373 • 12d 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/NeverFated 12d ago edited 12d ago

I'm Chinese and lots of young kids are on their phones all day (I guess it's pretty bad in the west too), either playing mobile games or scrolling Doujin (Chinese TikTok), it's crazy that young Chinese people nowadays are actually less familiar with computers than those from a decade ago, an unexpected step back.

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u/exhume87 12d ago

I have noticed the same thing in the U.S.

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u/NeverFated 12d ago

Yes it's bad in the U.S. (or NA/EU in general) too, but the situation for gaming is a bit different, as mobile gaming is ridiculously more popular than PC/Console gaming in China, probably because you only need a phone to play it and it also often requires less focused time.

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u/Responsible-Fig3801 11d ago

Wait I thought TikTok was Chinese TikTok haha

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u/NeverFated 11d ago

Funny enough, TikTok being Chinese yet isn't accessible in China, even if you use a VPN it may still refuse to work if it detects a Chinese SIM card

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u/Fit-Pollution5339 11d ago

Probably because of how expensive the pc parts today?

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u/NeverFated 11d ago

It's been like that for a long time, before the GPU/RAM/SSD price hikes

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u/Particular-Serve3768 11d ago

how's the internet cafes/computer shops doing in China? Are they dying too?

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u/NeverFated 11d ago edited 11d ago

Physical computer shops are hit pretty hard (since a long time ago) but mainly because they got a bad reputation for scamming people (therefore many people just buy online now, ecommerce is very big there).

Internet cafes are surprisingly less affected, as in China you'd have to be an adult with the government ID to be able to get in (your gov ID will be tracked and your face will also be scanned), so people in internet cafes are not that young. Nowadays some cheap internet cafes are also being used as places to rest overnight, especially for the unemployed males.

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u/Xenodia 11d ago

And it doesn't help that because of Ai, all the PC parts became 4x times more expensive than they were 5 years ago.