U.S. Arena of Valor Revenue Reaches $5 Million as Tencent Increases Focus on Western Markets

With the one year anniversary of its official Western launch just a month away, Tencent's mobile MOBA Arena of Valor—known as Honor of Kings in China where it is a certified, multi-billion-dollar phenomena—has reached another, albeit less staggering, milestone in the United States. According to Sensor Tower's Store Intelligence data, the game has just surpassed $5 million in U.S. player spending on the App Store and Google Play, the most it has made in any English-speaking market so far to date.

Looking at the two largest of those, this figure is about six times greater than the $820,000 we estimated the game has grossed in Great Britain so far and nearly seven times greater than the $765,000 we show players in Canada have spent.

Comparing Arena of Valor revenue in the United States against its primary rivals in the mobile MOBA category, we show it trailing behind the estimated $10 million in spending Mobile Legends from Moonton saw during the same number of days following its 2016 launch. However, it ranks just ahead of Super Evil Megacorp-developed title Vainglory, which grossed approximately $4.9 million in the amount of time after it became available on both iOS and Android in mid-2015.

The game's Chinese version has seen in excess of $3.7 billion spent on iOS alone since launching there in late 2015. That's 740 times what the title has grossed in the U.S. thus far. But with a free-to-play Nintendo Switch version of the game just released and ongoing eSports plans supporting it, there's hope that Arena of Valor can continue to establish itself here in the West, narrowing that gap in the process. By how much, however, remains to be seen.