Honor of Kings

No development budget has ever been disclosed for the original game. Revenue needs two separate readings. Tencent's own filings name Honor of Kings as a driver but never isolate it — its 2024 annual results say only that domestic games revenue rose 23% to RMB 33.2 billion 'benefitting from… growth in revenue from major games such as Honour of Kings'. The per-year numbers therefore come from third-party analytics and are estimates: roughly $2.8 billion in 2021, $1.5 billion in 2023, $2.6 billion in 2024, and about $14.5 billion lifetime. Those trackers only see the App Store and Google Play, and cannot see China's Android ecosystem — where most of the player base actually is — so they materially understate the true figure. Some official numbers do exist and are much firmer: RMB 10.7 billion (about $1.55 billion) in Q4 2016 per Tencent's annual report; roughly RMB 3 billion in the single month of April 2017, then about half of all Tencent mobile game revenue; over $1 billion in the single month of February 2019. The user figures are first-party and enormous: 50 million daily users and 200 million registered players by 2016, 100 million daily users announced at the fifth anniversary in 2020, and a record 139 million daily and 260 million monthly users at the tenth anniversary in October 2025. Note that third-party dashboards showing roughly 10 million daily users are measuring only the non-China storefronts and should not be read as contradicting Tencent's figures.