Level Infinite, the publisher of mobile MOBA Honor of Kings, has revealed the game’s esports roadmap for 2025.
The plans were unveiled during the Honor of Kings Championship final held in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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The Honor of Kings (HOK) 2025 season will be centred around three global events — Honor of Kings Invitational Season 3, Honor of Kings Invitational Midseason and the Honor of Kings Championship.
Honor of Kings Invitational Season 3 will be the first global event, set to occur in spring. More details about the event’s size and location will be shared at a later date. However, the location was teased as somewhere ‘not far’ from Jakarta.
The second event, Honor of Kings Invitational Midseason, will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with a ‘big prize pool’ expected. Though not explicitly stated during the announcement, this could likely be an event at the Esports World Cup, as was the case with the 2024 iteration. That event saw its HOK tournament include a total prize pool of $3.05m (~£2.35m).
Finally, the Honor of Kings Championship will conclude the season, though no locations or date details were shared.
On a regional level, two new leagues — HOK Major East and HOK Major West — will be created to provide more frequent competition, with a further announcement to come regarding which regions will be split into which conference.
The ecosystem announcement also included plans to launch a third-party tournament application page for potential organisers to obtain tournament licenses. Organisers will be provided with different levels of support depending on the size and nature of their tournament.
Finally, a decision has been made to move Honor of Kings esports to a global ban system in which champions banned during pick/ban phases of best-of series cannot be played at all during a series once they have been banned once.
The changes were revealed by James Yang, Senior Director of Global Esports Center at Level Infinite, during the Honor of Kings Championship final. The best-of-seven series, which saw Black Shrew Esport beat Dominator Esports 4-0, reached 387,000 peak concurrent viewers, the highest figure reached by the game so far according to Esports Charts. It’s worth noting, however, that Esports Charts does not record Chinese viewership, Honor of Kings’ biggest market.
