Honor of Kings International Championship 2022: a $10 million prize pool but shockingly low viewership

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Honor of Kings is one of the world's most-played games: with more than 100 million daily active players, the title built a considerable fan base, and its competitive scene quickly became one of the biggest in the mobile industry. To reach a wider audience, Tencent created Arena of Valor, an adaptation of the game made specifically for the Western audience. However, in 2021 it was announced the esports scenes of both games would converge. 

Since then, Tencent released Honor of Kings, in a beta test stage, in many Western countries and regions, such as Brazil, Turkey, Latin America, and the Middle East. These countries gained their own leagues, and their respective winners would qualify for the Honor of Kings International Championship 2022. This tournament is the rebranding of the Arena of Valor International Championship, and it also replaces the Honor of Kings World Champion Cup. This means that Honor of Kings International Championship is the game's most prestigious tournament, and arguably the pinnacle of the mobile esports scene.

Honor of Kings International Championship 2022 is the first edition of the event. It brings together the best 16 teams from all around the globe, to compete for an astonishing $10 million prize pool. It started on the 3rd of December and will finish on the 30th of the same month. The event is being held offline, and takes place in Shenzhen as well as in Seoul.

With a gigantic prize pool, and one of the biggest player bases in the video games industry, the expectations for the event viewership were high. However, in its first two days, the tournament showed lackluster numbers, with just 4.5K Peak Viewers, 2.3K Average Viewers, and only 35K Hours Watched. 

One of the reasons the event has not been able to attract many viewers is because of the insufficient promo campaign. For example, Honor of Kings International Championship 2022 official broadcast channel, which is directed to Western fans, has only 5.5K subscribers, and was created only back in May of 2022. The same can be said about the socials: thus, the Twitter page of the tournament was also created in the same month, meaning that was when the overall promotional campaign of the event for the Western audience started.

The official YouTube broadcast channel of the Chinese community has a much bigger following, but their viewership numbers are still disappointing. However, the number of viewers on Chinese streaming platforms is astonishing. Doyu had 6 million reactions by heat index, while Huya had 10 million. Proving the tournament is still a huge success domestically, it just didn't reach the international audience it intended. 

We have plenty of international channels broadcasting the event, and in many different languages. Some are watch parties, while others are official broadcasts of the event. The majority of them have all been created years ago, have a substantial number of subscribers, and reach a wider audience. Despite that, every international channel that has broadcasted the tournament so far had less than 1K Average Viewers. 

If we take a look at the three biggest international streaming platforms the event is being broadcasted in, we get further proof that its viewership numbers are far from ideal. YouTube is the platform of choice for most fans, with 4K Peak Viewers. FB only had 425 PV, with Twitch reaching 361 simultaneous viewers. For a tournament of this magnitude, it's not attracting as many viewers as expected.

Honor of Kings International Championship 2022 viewership comparison with Arena of Valor Premier League 2022

Arena of Valor Premier League 2022 is a replacement for its World Cup, and is taking place at the same time as Honor of Kings International Championship 2022. When we compare both events, the viewership numbers of Honor of Kings look even worse. 

The Arena of Valor event managed to attract much more interncaional viewers, and the majority of them are also from Asian countries. Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese, are the most popular languages the event is broadcasted on. With the audience of both events overlapping, fans are more excited to tune into Arena of Valor Premier League 2022. With 355K Peak Viewers, 104K Average Viewers, and 10.4 million Hours Watched, it's clear which tournament is the most interesting, especially for non-Chinese viewers. 

Honor of Kings International Championship 2022 is still far from over, so we may see an increase in the event viewership numbers. However, its undeniable that the event is underperforming in every metric, and something will need to be done to reach a wider audience. 

The idea to bring the game to the Western audience is a good one, but it's not having great results so far. Asia, especially China, always made up the majority of the players and viewers of Honor of Kings. With Arena of Valor Premier League 2022 attracting more attention from Asian fans, and with Honor of Kings not being as popular in the Western world, it led Honor of Kings International Championship 2022 to have astonishingly low viewership numbers. 

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