Honor of Kings at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last July.
MANILA, Philippines – The Esports World Cup Foundation (EWCF) announced at the end of the 2025 Esports World Cup that a new esports tournament is in the works, this time shifting the spotlight from professional teams to national ones with the creation of the Esports Nations Cup.
“We announced the ENC during the New Global Sport Conference at the end of the [Esports World Cup (EWC)] this year and we’ve committed that it’s November next year. We’ve already drawn a line in the sand and we’ve said that it will be November, so you can imagine now going from one huge event to two huge events in one year is going to keep us out of mischief and keep us very busy for the next few months,” said Mike McCabe, deputy CEO and COO of EWCF in an interview with international media prior to the King Pro League grand finals in Beijing, China.
For McCabe, the ENC was the logical next step after the success of EWC, shifting the narrative from professional clubs to national teams.
He added, “We know that national fandom transcends team fandom in a way that we’ve seen with other [traditional] sports whether it be the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics. There’s a passion to see when your players are wearing your country’s flag on their jersey. We thought it would help us open the aperture a little bit of esports. When we have national teams and national representation, that national fandom will help us jump into a more mainstream audience and we think it’s going to ultimately grow the scale of esports and hopefully bring some new countries and new players onto the stage as well where they don’t necessarily have that opportunity.”
The announcement also stated that one of the partners for the ENC would be game publisher Tencent Games — the publisher of Honor of Kings, the world’s most played MOBA game with over 200 million registered users and more than 100 million daily players.
“We are following a similar philosophy for ENC that we have for EWC, which means we want to bring the biggest and most important games. Tencent is obviously then the logical partner to work with. If we look at global IPs and how to do it well, especially we will be quite busy, we need to work with partners who know us and can very quickly scale up a high quality triple-A tournament which is unique and hasn’t been seen in that scale in the world before. So automatically it means that we will work with Tencent on this,” said Fabian Scheuermann, EWCF’s chief games officer.
Tencent Games has been breaking boundaries with large-scale esports tournaments with their King Pro League (KPL), the Honor of Kings Professional League in China. Their most recent grand finals held at the Beijing National Stadium, commonly called The Bird’s Nest, broke the Guiness world record for the largest attendance for an esports match with 62,196 attendees.
“Honor of Kings, being a mobile title is incredibly important to us and one of the things that’s really key for us is making sure that we get full global representation for gamers all around the world. And mobile as a platform is the biggest gaming platform in the world and so it’s really important for us that we have the biggest mobile titles. We know with KPL, the incredible position that Honor of Kings has in China, but as we see the international growth of Honor of Kings, it’s going to be able to help us connect to more and more mobile players around the world beyond China as well. And so that for us made it very easy for us to make that selection and obviously working a long time relationships with the team at Tencent, it’s really been a great partnership to be able to reach those mobile players,” added McCabe.
The global esports ecosystem of Honor of Kings is currently holding its culminating event — the Honor of Kings International Championship (KIC) in Manila with the playoffs already under way. Philippine teams Blacklist International and Boom Esports are still hoping to secure the country its first international Honor of Kings trophy as the final rounds of the knockout stages resume on November 28 at the Ayala Malls By The Bay.
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