On November 8, a phone game achieved something only the largest sports leagues can manage: tens of thousands of spectators in a single national venue.

Tencent’s Honor of Kings staged its King Pro League (KPL) Grand Final inside Beijing’s National Stadium – the Bird’s Nest – certified at 62,196 paying attendees, a new record for a video game match. 

Tickets disappeared in roughly the time it takes to refresh a screen: 12 seconds, according to event organizers and coverage at the time. The headline detail that matters even more than the number is what it implies about cultural gravity. A mobile game – long treated in the West as a casual substitute for “real” gaming – is now big enough in China to justify an Olympic venue, a ticketing rush, and the kind of pilgrimage behavior normally associated with sports finals or pop megatours. 

It is tempting to treat the Bird’s Nest spectacle as a novelty – a one-off Guinness gimmick. That would miss the point. What happened in Beijing is better understood as the visible capstone of a decade-long strategy in which Chinese firms and regulators helped make the smartphone the country’s default entertainment device, and then treated mobile games as a flagship cultural industry: something to be built, optimized, broadcast, toured, and exported. Beyond that, it points to the global future of games.

A Phone-first Ecosystem, Built on Hardware and Bandwidth

Hongyu Chen, co-founder of The Esports Advocate, an expert on China’s esports and games industry for 18 years, described how earlier waves of Chinese gaming grew out of the constraints of a developing economy.

“Twenty years ago, China was a developing country. Most families couldn’t afford a PC or laptop,” he told me.

That gap helped build China’s internet café culture – the crucible for early PC esports – but it also left a structural opening for the device that eventually became both cheaper and more ubiquitous than the café seat: the smartphone.

“After 2008, the iPhone changed everything,” Chen said. “Then Chinese smartphone brands like Xiaomi and Huawei came out… Smartphones also became much cheaper…........

© The Diplomat