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How TiMi makes Honor of Kings, the world’s most-played mobile MOBA
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Dave Tach
The developers at TiMi Studio Group are hoping to change that. They are the creators of Honor of Kings, a mobile MOBA that is as wildly successful as it is profitable. Honor of Kings boasts 100 million active players every day. It is, by several estimates, the most profitable mobile game in history.
“We are a group of passionate game developers dedicated to sharing joy with players, and Honor of Kings serves as the bridge that brings joy to life,” Game Producer Dean Huang said. “From the very beginning, our mission has been to lower the barrier of entry for MOBA games, enabling more players to experience the fun and excitement of the genre.”
The goal is for Honor of Kings to walk a middle path: to acknowledge that mobile MOBAs can and should be different than their PC counterparts; to build a place where matches aren’t too long for the expectations of their hardware; and to be accessible to veterans and newcomers alike.
Epic Games Store interviewed Huang about the game, translating it to mobile, creating heroes, and keeping players interested worldwide—and perhaps most importantly for TiMi, finding that middle path.
The rise of MOBAs
Honor of Kings was released in 2015, but in some ways its story begins—like all MOBAs—in 2003, with the release of Defense of the Ancients, more commonly known as Dota (or DotA or DOTA), a Warcraft III mod that arguably created and certainly popularized the multiplayer online battle arena genre. The story’s dotted line continues through another popular MOBA.
In 2009, developer Riot Games released League of Legends, a standalone MOBA. LoL became incredibly popular, just like Dota (and later, developer Valve’s Dota 2).
MOBAs were thriving on PC, but smartphone-powered mobile gaming was on the rise. In 2011, the Chinese gaming and internet-focused conglomerate Tencent bought 97% of LoL developer Riot, and there was a desire to bring the increasingly popular genre to mobile.
In 2014, two Tencent-owned studios combined to form TiMi Studio Group. The next year, in 2015, the developers released Honor of Kings, a mobile MOBA targeting mainland China. In less than a decade, it became the most profitable mobile game in the world.
How MOBAs work
If you don’t know MOBAs, trying to follow along is like watching a sport for the first time. Everybody’s speaking a shared foreign language with their bodies, and none of it makes sense. Even Riot Games’ co-founder Marc Merrill acknowledged the genre’s difficulty curve in a 2019 Washington Post interview.
“It’s like, once you start to play it, once you kind of get over the hump—and that hump is big, like 10 or 20 games sometimes—that’s when you start to appreciate why anybody would think it's cool,” he said.
“MOBA is a genre that heavily relies on the coordination of five players working together to achieve victory,” Huang said.
Here’s how MOBAs work. In Honor of Kings, there are two teams, each with five players. They face off on a square battlefield. Each has a base. One is at the bottom left corner of the map, and one is at the top right. Each team’s goal is to destroy a structure on the opposing team’s base.
There are several roads (or lanes in MOBA parlance) between the two bases. One rings the perimeter of the square battlefield. That’s subdivided into the top lane and the bottom lane, named for their positions above or below the middle lane, a road that runs diagonally across the battlefield, directly between the bases in the corners. Running diagonally from the top left to the bottom right is an area known as the river. So picture a square with an X crossing through it, and you’re pretty much there.
The vast, triangular landscape in-between lanes is referred to as the jungle. In this area are non-player enemies who grant buffs when defeated. It’s also a great place to hide, jump out of, and attack players traveling the lanes.
Most of the action occurs in the lanes, but it’s more than just direct confrontation between heroes. Each of these characters has different abilities that make them adept for the challenges of each lane.
Each team has a series of towers that sit along the lanes. These towers attack the opposing team, which means that nobody can just stroll along the roads and attack their opponent’s base without resistance. Each team also has a constant supply of minions, little enemies who automatically spawn from each base and march down lanes to attack their foes.
Play, level up during each match, win, and receive rewards. There are two teams, five heroes, several lanes, several towers, many minions, and monsters in the jungle. From this premise, the genre exploded in popularity, both in player count and as an esports staple.
But it’s still a lot to learn, and the developers at TiMi know it. That’s why Honor of Kings doesn’t just tell new players how to play; it shows them.
“When a new player enters Honor of Kings, we ask them to indicate their experience with MOBA games to match them with different tutorial processes," Huang said. "Experienced MOBA players will be quickly guided to experience Honor of Kings' battlefield matches, while players without MOBA experience will follow a step-by-step system tutorial to learn the game's rules and controls before entering the 5v5 battlefield.”
Making a mobile MOBA
On PC, MOBAs can take advantage of large displays and the precision inputs of keyboards and a mouse. Touch-first mobile devices don’t have those affordances by default, and Honor of Kings makes decisions that fit classic MOBA design within those constraints.
“Honor of Kings’ primary goal is to replicate classic MOBA matches on mobile,” Huang said, “so we designed a dual joystick system to replace the keyboard and addressed the challenge of map visibility on a mobile screen. Additionally, we focused on mobile gaming characteristics to provide players with a faster-paced and more diverse gameplay experience.”
For example, the battlefield is significantly smaller than those of its PC counterparts, but it contains the same core elements, like lanes, jungles, and heroes. And there’s a minimap floating over the screen to show you where everyone else is. Matches are designed to be shorter, too, clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.
TiMi built Honor of Kings with some smart contextual controls that appear when appropriate and fade away when irrelevant.
“Different gaming platforms shape the way controls are designed,” Huang said. “Building on MOBA’s success on PC, we set out to optimize the experience for mobile by leveraging its unique dual-joystick system. This approach allowed us to design intuitive mechanics for actions such as kiting, quick casting, and skill combos. As a result, mobile players can enjoy controls that are easy to learn, smooth, and tailored specifically for touch gameplay.”
Perhaps no feature is more indicative of TiMi’s understanding of the mobile platform than Disconnection Takeover, which is designed to smooth over dropouts.
“[Disconnection Takeover] allows players who disconnect due to unexpected issues to rejoin the game smoothly and stay aligned with the match’s pace, while also minimizing the negative impact of their temporary absence,” he said.
It’s a clever feature, but the programming is where it really shines. Disconnection Takeover doesn’t simply put a random bot where a player once was. Instead, when a player is absent, it aims to create an AI stand-in built to fit the context of the match and its players.
“When designing this feature, our main consideration was ensuring that the AI controlling the disconnected player could perform at a level close to the match’s overall average. To achieve this, the system assigns AI performance values based on each player’s historical match records and the final performance level of all players in the current match. This helps maintain fairness and reduces the impact of disconnections on the outcome of the game.”
Designing worldwide heroes
Every entry in the genre has a cast of heroes, and Honor of Kings is no exception.
“Each hero comes with a unique backstory and character design, which directly shape their skills and traits within the game,” Huang said. “When we introduce a new hero, we highlight not only their visual design but also the lore and background that define them, helping players better understand their abilities and strengths. This approach fosters a deeper connection between players and the heroes they play. To further support this, we create tutorial videos for every hero—both to help onboard new players and to showcase the abilities of new heroes as they join the roster.”
In the beginning, Honor of Kings’ heroes were inspired by Chinese folklore and mythology. Mainland China was, after all, the home territory of Tencent and TiMi, and it was the target market for the game.
A year after Honor of Kings’ release, TiMi released Arena of Valor. Built using the same engine as Honor of Kings, it was a mobile MOBA designed for worldwide markets. Arena of Valor remains in active development, though Honor of Kings is the more popular title. And in the intervening years, Honor of Kings has expanded its repertoire of heroes to encompass worldwide themes, just like Arena of Valor did from the beginning.
According to Huang, this is a big component of Honor of Kings’ success.
“Localization goes beyond translation, adapting content to reflect regional cultures and tastes, making the game accessible and enjoyable worldwide,” Huang said. “We feel it is important to provide heroes that appeal to players from around the world and resonate with their respective cultures and celebrate key events in their calendars such as festivals or landmark events.”
He offered several examples from the last few years alone.
“For example, in June 2024, we introduced Luara, a hero inspired by Latin America folklore—the Boitatá, a mythical fire serpent. On the 572nd anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul, which took place in June 2025, we introduced Fatih, reflecting the country’s rich historical heritage. This week in Malaysia, we developed a skin inspired by Puteri Gunung Ledang, a beloved figure in traditional folklore, spotlighting Malaysia’s vibrant arts and cultural heritage through an exciting collaboration with celebrated Malaysian singer, songwriter, and music producer Mimifly.”
Listening to players
“Player feedback has always been absolutely crucial,” Huang said. “There's no overstating how important it is. Whether it comes through customer service, community discussions, or in-game behavior and post-match data, it has continuously guided our update plans.”
The developers monitor things like hero popularity and hero use (they’re “not always positively correlated,” he points out), and they use that to improve the game.
“Based on the information we gather from the game and the community’s feedback, [that] allows us to make dynamic adjustments to heroes’ appearances, skills, and stats.”
Walking the middle path
“Honor of Kings aims to bring a higher quality, fresher, fairer, and regularly updated MOBA game experience to players worldwide,” Huang said.
He thinks of it as satisfying two broad groups of players.
“For experienced MOBA players,” he said, “we are confident that Honor of Kings is one of the most optimized and finest games in the mobile MOBA genre. It seamlessly combines the fast-paced experience required by mobile gaming with the strategic depth demanded by MOBA enthusiasts, making it one of the best games on the market in this regard.”
And for those who benefited greatly from learning what a MOBA is earlier in this story, Dean Huang thinks that Honor of Kings can welcome you, too.
“For casual players, we also offer a variety of gameplay modes in Honor of Kings, local heroes, high-quality personal expression spaces, and numerous IP collaborations, providing all players with a richer, more diverse, and appealing gaming experience.”
Honor of Kings was released on the Epic Games Store for mobile earlier this year, and you can download it for free today. And while you’re doing that, be sure to read our Honor of Kings beginner’s guide.