HoK International Championship 2025 sets new Honor of Kings esports record
The Honor of Kings International Championship 2025 concluded on November 30 at the Ayala Malls Manila Bay in Metro Manila. Continuing its global rise since the recent adoption of a more global strategy, this event created history as Honor of Kings's most popular tournament ever.
The top international championship for the 2025 Honor of Kings season saw participation from the top 16 sides across the globe. Alongside a prize pool of $1 million, three slots for the fifth edition of the Honor of Kings Challenger Cup were also at stake.
After around two weeks of action, the Honor of Kings International Championship 2025, held across two venues in the Philippines, was won by HomeBois BSE. It was the second straight world title for this roster, which clinched the 2024 edition as Black Shrew Esport.
HomeBois BSE beat Nova Esports in an all-Malaysian Grand Final 4:0 to clinch the world title and continue the country's reign atop the game's esports segment. To top things off, Alpha Gaming finished third, ensuring that all three sides qualifying for the 2025 Honor of Kings Challenger Cup were from this Southeast Asian nation.
The finals was also the most popular match at this HoK International Championship event, touching a whopping 696,262 Peak Viewers (PV). This set a new record for Honor of Kings, beating the previous mark set at the inaugural Honor of Kings World Cup 2025 by around 6.6%.
No other game from this top-tier Honor of Kings competition crossed the 100K PV mark, with the matches averaging around 23,500 viewers before the final day, when the Grand Final was held. This was because the summit clash was heavily promoted on Facebook, helping to attract a much larger audience than the rest of the tournament.
As a result of this spike in viewership on the final day, multiple languages reached new Honor of Kings esports records, including:
- English (175,351 PV)
- Tagalog (148,101 PV)
- Indonesian (139,277 PV)
- Arabic (63,617 PV)
- Spanish (39,722 PV)
The KIC 2025 also became one of just three events in Honor of Kings to breach the 3 million Hours Watched (HW) mark. The HoK x Esports World Cup 2025 tops this list, with the 2024 World Championship taking the third spot.
Most popular and watched Honor of Kings events
The move to launch Honor of Kings — a dominant name in the Chinese MOBA market for years — internationally has also seen more international co-streamers cover the games on multiple livestreaming services. YouTube and TikTok continued to grow their audiences, with the Google-owned platform and video-sharing mobile app seeing their watch time shares jump by around 6% compared to the 2024 Honor of Kings Championship.
Setting aside the promoted Grand Finals at the Honor of Kings International Championship 2025, it is safe to say that Honor of Kings events still face a lack of consistent viewership throughout. This is not too dissimilar to other renowned esports titles, apart from the top-tier ones like League of Legends and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.
Moreover, Honor of Kings is a title whose esports events still rely on the in-game stream and its massive audience base on Facebook. Even at the HoK International Championship 2025, 40% of its watch time came from the in-game broadcast, while Facebook viewers contributed 24% to this tally.
How the organizers rectify this viewership issue, even as the game continues its international push, will play a key part in how its esports scene does in the long term. For now, Malaysian fans can enjoy their teams' dominance even as these sides gear up for the 2025 Honor of Kings Challenger Cup, which will be held in China from December 6, 2025, to January 2, 2026.
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