Paul Delos Santos is a reporter based in Las Vegas. He covers the Vegas Golden Knights for NHL.com and also covers esports and general Las Vegas sports for The Sporting Tribune. He’s a gamer who never has time to play them, so he naturally opted to write and talk about them instead.
Olivia Richman is a seasoned esports journalist who has worked with Inven Global, Esports Illustrated, Esports.gg, and more. As an editor and writer at Esports Insider, she loves telling unique esports stories, especially within the FGC. When not working and gaming, Olivia loves collecting Kirby plush, eating sushi, and driving her cars at the track.
Image Credit: Esports Foundation It’s easy to know that League of Legends , with its immense history and popularity, is the most watched MOBA in the world. In 2025 alone, more than 735.9 million watch hours of League of Legends content were viewed by fans, according to Esports Charts.
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang , League’s mobile cousin, ranked second in MOBA with 435.1 million watch hours.
Honor of Kings , another mobile MOBA, is fourth, trailing behind the top two and MOBA staple DOTA 2 in the watch hour rankings. Even though it trails massively behind the other three games (Honor of Kings has failed to crack the 100 million watch hour mark), it is receiving a bit of buzz recently.
“2025 was a record year specifically for the mobile MOBAs,” Esports Charts co-founder and CEO Artyom Odintsov told Esports Insider. “Both MLBB’s M7 World Championship and the Honor of Kings World Cup hit new all-time highs in hours watched and peak viewers, while League’s last all-time record was set back in 2024, and Dota 2’s in 2021.”
League of Legends and DOTA 2’s global viewership is well known in the esports space, while Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has a strong viewership in Southeast Asia.
So, where are Honor of Kings fans coming from? Well, if you thought China – where the game is from and where it takes much of its lore – you’d guess right. But it isn’t the only area that’s watching.
Image Credit: Esports Chart In a broad sense, Southeast Asia is by all accounts the home of mobile MOBAs.
While China owns much of the fan base for Honor of Kings, Indonesia remains one of the top markets for the title.
According to findings by Esports Charts, Indonesia accounts for 34.9 percent of the title’s viewership.
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Honor of Kings’ MOBA sibling, is much more concentrated.
Esports Charts’ data revealed that 97.8 percent of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s watch hours in 2025 came solely from Southeast Asia.
A deeper view of the title shows that Indonesia is the predominant country, with 63.5 percent of watch hours coming from the country.
The Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore are also among the top markets.
Odintsov credited the mobile games’ commitment to prioritizing constant, localized content over occasional global peaks.
While League of Legends does similarly with its regions, the one area that mobile MOBAs have is an instant transition from viewer to player.
“Mobile MOBAs grew by being local and constant rather than global and occasional,” Odintsov said. “National leagues [run] most of the year in the viewer’s own language, on the phone they already play on. Mobile Legends now accounts for 61.6 percent of all esports watch hours on TikTok, a platform PC esports has barely entered.”
But at the Esports World Cup, the MOBAs were the start of the event, amassing record numbers…