Arena of Valor: The MOBA the West Forgot and Thailand Adopted

At the 33rd SEA Games, more than one million people were watching the same mobile game final at once. It was the men's Arena of Valor final at the Games, hosted by Thailand, and the opponents were Vietnam and Thailand, the two countries that love this game more than anywhere else on Earth.

That might surprise you. In North America and Europe, Arena of Valor is remembered, if at all, as Tencent's attempt to bring its Chinese hit Honor of Kings to the West, an attempt that never took off. In Korea it closed in 2022. But across Southeast Asia, under local names like RoV in Thailand and Liên Quân Mobile in Vietnam, it became one of the region's biggest games.

One game, many names

Arena of Valor was built by Tencent's TiMi Studio Group as an international version of Honor of Kings, the Chinese MOBA we profile in our Honor of Kings feature. It kept the five-versus-five format and short matches but replaced many Chinese heroes with fantasy and Western-style characters, and later added DC Comics heroes.

It rolled out region by region, often under different names:

• Taiwan: 12 October 2016, published by Garena.
• Vietnam (Liên Quân Mobile): 21 November 2016, by Garena.
• Thailand (Realm of Valor, or RoV): 26 December 2016, by Garena.
• South Korea (Penta Storm): 26 April 2017, by Netmarble.
• Europe: August 2017, and the Americas: December 2017.
• Japan: November 2018, with DeNA.

Garena, the Singapore publisher best known today for Free Fire (our story), handled the markets where the game would matter most.

Why the West never clicked

In the West, Arena of Valor faced two problems. Many PC players already had League of Legends, and Riot, also owned by Tencent, complained about the resemblance. In 2019, Tencent pulled back the game's Western marketing, clearing the way for Riot's own mobile MOBA, League of Legends: Wild Rift, announced that October.

Korea was another miss. Netmarble's Penta Storm never held on to its players, and Korean service ended on 29 July 2022. On 20 June 2024, Tencent launched the original Honor of Kings worldwide, adding some Arena of Valor heroes, a clear signal that the global future belonged to the parent game.

Why Southeast Asia did

In Thailand and Vietnam, the story was the opposite. Garena ran the game like a local product, with local events, local voice work, cafés and university tournaments and a constant stream of skins. Local leagues such as Thailand's RoV Pro League filled studios and arenas.

International events made it bigger still. The first Arena of Valor International Championship, held in South Korea in November 2017, drew more than 36 million online viewers. The Arena of Valor World Cup went to Los Angeles in 2018 and to Da Nang, Vietnam, in 2019.

Then came the medals. Arena of Valor was an official medal event at the 2019 SEA Games in the Philippines and the 2021 SEA Games in Vietnam. At the 33rd SEA Games, a women's division was added, and the men's Vietnam versus Thailand final peaked at 1,042,982 concurrent viewers, with more than 3.5 million hours watched.

The 2026 scandal

Success brought pressure. A case from those Games reached its end in March 2026. A Thai player had tried to have someone off-site play for her using unapproved software. The Thai team withdrew, the player received a lifetime competition ban, and the case produced the first criminal convictions of their kind under Thailand's computer-crime law, a sign of how seriously the country now treats its esports.

Why it matters

Arena of Valor is a lesson in how a "failed" game can be a giant somewhere else. The global charts said it lost; Thai and Vietnamese players said otherwise, and built one of the most passionate MOBA scenes in the world around it. Our take: if you visit Bangkok or Hanoi, ask someone about RoV or Liên Quân. You will probably get a match invitation. For the region's other MOBA giant, read our Mobile Legends feature.