Honor of Kings: World Sets April 30 China Open Beta Launch Date

Five years of development and a collaboration with the author of "The Three-Body Problem" put Honor of Kings: World in a different category from most mobile launches. TiMi Studio Group's open-world action RPG confirmed its China open beta date of April 30, 2025, available on both iOS and Android, completing a journey that began with China's National Press and Publication Administration approving the title in January 2025 as part of a batch of 136 newly cleared games.

The date was locked in at the Tencent Games Conference on April 22, 2025, where TiMi Studio unveiled a new gameplay demonstration and opened pre-registration in China. The game is a deliberate departure from its source material: where Honor of Kings proper is a MOBA that became the world's highest-grossing mobile game in 2024 with $2.6 billion in gross revenue, World is a cooperative open-world action RPG. Media comparisons positioned it somewhere between Monster Hunter and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with players teaming up with established Honor of Kings heroes and deploying their signature skills across large-scale open-world environments.

The narrative dimension sets it apart from the competition. Liu Cixin, who won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel as the first Asian writer to receive that honor and has claimed China's Galaxy Award nine times, contributed a story arc drawn from his 1997 short story "The Poetry Cloud." His involvement brought a level of literary credibility that few mobile titles can claim.

Development began around 2020, with the game's first public announcement following in October/November 2021. By September 2024, it had reached a global stage, featured at Apple's iPhone 16 launch event as a flagship hardware showcase. The GamingonPhone Awards 2025 named it Most Anticipated Game of the Year ahead of its open beta.

The franchise backing the spin-off is formidable. AppMagic estimates the original Honor of Kings MOBA has generated $17.36 billion on the App Store and Google Play since its November 26, 2015 debut in mainland China, with China accounting for at least 98% of that figure. The franchise has not been without turbulence: Chinese state media labeled the original game "poison" to young people in 2017, an incident that cost Tencent roughly $14 billion in stock value at the time.

International publishing fell to Level Infinite, Tencent's dedicated global subsidiary. TiMi Studio Group, headquartered in Shenzhen with branches in Singapore, Los Angeles, Chengdu, and Shanghai, recently disclosed for the first time that it has reached 100 million monthly active users outside mainland China. The studio, which also developed Call of Duty: Mobile and Pokémon Unite, recorded an estimated $10 billion in revenue in 2020. Honor of Kings: World is central to TiMi's push beyond its China stronghold, with global release details still pending and worldwide pre-registration already open via iOS.