Shanghai-based game publisher MOONTON, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, announced that it officially launched its flagship esports title, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang in China. The China region will join the global MLBB esports ecosystem with franchise slot fees and the opportunity of revenue sharing from the game publisher.
In addition, MOONTON also announced that it had signed a strategic partnership deal with Chinese smartphone brand Realme. Realme smartphones will become the official equipment provider of the MLBB tournament in China. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Chinese esports organization Invictus Gaming (IG) also announced on Wednesday that it will establish its MLBB division. In December 2024, IG completed a restructuring with two new investors—Chinese live streaming platform Huya and multi-channel network (MCN) company Young Sports. The organization disbanded its Dota 2 division and only retained its League of Legends team in China’s League of Legends Pro League (LPL). MLBB is the second esports title that IG decided to invest in after its restructuring.
MLBB is also one of the official esports titles in the Saudi Arabian government-backed Esports World Cup (EWC). It’s not clear how the Chinese MLBB domestic competition would connect the EWC, as of this writing.
MLBB is considered a rival of Tencent’s Honor of Kings, the biggest MOBA mobile esports title in China for years. MLBB has received over 700M downloads outside of China, mostly in Southeast Asia. MOONTON reported that it has over 1.5B users globally with over 110M monthly active users (MAU). On Jan. 14, ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) and Qualcomm Technologies also announced that they would host Mobile Masters MLBB 2025 in Jakarta, Indonesia, from April 11-13.
In 2021, Reuters reported that ByteDance acquired MOONTON at around $4B USD valuation, putting it in direct competition against Tencent. However, the gaming business was not the main focus for ByteDance as it owns short-form video platform TikTok and Douyin. There were a few rumors in 2023-2024 that ByteDance planned to sell MOONTON as well as drop out of the gaming business. ByteDance also owns game studio Nuverse, which is also the distributor of Marvel Snap. The game was temporarily shut down for 14 hours in the U.S on Jan. 19 in tandem with TikTok going dark. Marvel Snap also went offline for a few hours.