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Before Honour of Kings became the world’s most popular game, it was a desperate experiment
- Honour of Kings was created after Chinese gaming giant Tencent failed to convince League of Legends’ creators to develop a mobile version of the PC game
- It is now the world’s most popular game and the first on any platform to average more than 100 million users a day
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In 2015 when Chinese gaming giant Tencent Holdings tabled the idea of creating a mobile version of League of Legends, it could not get the game’s creator, California-based Riot Games, to agree.
At the time, mobile was not commonly seen as the platform for cutting edge, competitive games and the founders of Riot – which Tencent owned 93 per cent of at the time – did not want to water down its hottest PC game to be played on smartphones.
Determined to release a League of Legends-like title for mobile, Shenzhen-based Tencent soon launched a similar multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed by another of its subsidiaries, TiMi Studios.
Honour of Kings was a smash hit and went on to become the first game in the world on any platform to average more than 100 million users a day – the equivalent of about the entire population of the UK and Canada combined.
The game looked so similar to League of Legends in its early days that it reportedly sparked an uproar in Los Angeles when Riot employees discovered early screenshots of it.
“We were stunned,” tech news site The Information quoted a former Riot employee as saying. “They were blatantly ripping off our intellectual property.”
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