HoK Invitational 2024 Season 2 becomes game's most popular event after seeing 300% growth in viewership

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The Honor of Kings Invitational 2024 Season 2 concluded at the Sunway Velocity Mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on July 7. With qualification for the ongoing Esports World Cup 2024 at stake, this event broke several viewership records in the game, reinforcing its aim of becoming a more globally inclusive offering.

This Honor of Kings tournament invited teams from around the world as they vied for $300,000 and eight slots in the Riyadh cross-event spectacle. At the end of around ten days of action, LGD Gaming MY emerged as the champion, beating Team Secret in a pulsating Grand Final and pocketing $100,000.

  Honor of Kings Invitational 2024 Season 2 – Basic stats and most popular matches    

The Honor of Kings Invitational 2024 Season 2 hit a significant 241.2K Peak Viewers during the Showmatch between Team Honor and Team Kings. This exhibition match before the summit clash saw famous local influencers team divided into two teams, led by top players AG.Cat and LGD.NBW.Weizhuang from the King Pro League, which is why it attracted so much attention. The Grand Final itself was only the fifth most popular segment at this competition, as the games involving popular sides like Keyd Stars, Rex Regum Qeon, and Impunity were followed more by viewers.

Most importantly, this made it the most popular Honor of Kings tournament of all time, beating the previous record by a huge 301%. It has to be noted that the game's developer and publisher, TiMi Studio Group and Tencent Games, have invested heavily in the 2024 esports scene to broaden both its global and regional presence.

  LGD Gaming MY beat Team Secret in an all-Malaysian Grand Final to be crowned champion (Image via HoK Global Esports)   

The game has invested a total of $15 million for the current competitive season, which aims to shine a spotlight on the entire ecosystem, from the grassroots to the amateur and professional levels. This seems to have paid off handsomely so far, with the four most successful events in Honor of King's history by peak concurrent viewership all coming this year.

It shows that the international audience has wholeheartedly accepted a game long known for its mysticism due to its exclusivity to China. It was only recently that the game saw its international release to co-exist with its international version, Arena of Valor, with the Honor 200 Pro's introduction as the official smartphone for the EWC adding to the sense of occasion for the game.

A familiar name within the Southeast Asian esports circle made it to the top of the most popular team leaderboard, far outshining the other participants although its own performances were lackluster. However, there was enough in the action that fans saw to see this competition hit 1.9M Hours Watched and 45.2 Average Viewers over 42 hours of airtime.

Crucially, with a global context in mind, English ended as the second most popular language at the Honor of Kings Invitational 2024 Season 2 with almost 63K PV. That it outperformed Tagalog, a language intrinsically connected to the game for so long in a regional sense, bodes well game's future endeavors when it comes to international championships.

  Most popular Honor of Kings events of all time – the Invitational S2 saw a 300% jump thanks to an international audience   

Returning to comparisons, this tournament also became the most-watched one in HoK history, outperforming even global events. It did 53.3% better than the next-best entry, the King Pro League Spring 2021, which is the only other competition in this discipline to breach the 1M HW mark.

Looking at the next most popular competition, the difference in PV figures is stark, and there are a few reasons for that. Most egregious is the number of channels that covered the Brazil and Malaysia events, with the number increasing from a few dozen to a whopping 251. This meant more platforms covered the matches live, with Facebook proving the most crucial in this context.

As a result, the live section of Facebook saw a massive rise of 266.4% in the number of peak concurrent spectators it attracted. This also meant that it witnessed a substantial jump of 24.59% in its share of the overall watch time, with the five most popular channels (four Asian languages) to cover the tournament coming from FB.

TikTok, as is the recent trend at events it has had access to, also played a big role in these inflated Peak Viewers figures. Having not figured on the list of live-streaming services to broadcast the São Paulo event, it ended in fourth in the Kuala Lumpur one, contributing a not-too-shabby 12.81% to the total watch time.

So far, the two seasons in the HoK Invitational Series have ended in the top ten all-time lists for both watch time and peak online viewership. With two more such global tournaments to come, including the much-anticipated Honor of Kings Invitational Midseason 2024 at the EWC 2024, there is a good chance that these spectator records will be broken again, which can only be music to the ears of officials looking to earn a chunk of the lucrative international market.