Mobile Legends tops Q1 2026 esports views, powered by record M7 finals

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang didn’t just win Q1 2026 on hours watched. It beat League of Legends and Counter-Strike at the top of the esports viewing charts, with Esports Charts putting the mobile giant first across all titles as the M7 World Championship turned into a record-setting broadcast machine.

The biggest driver was M7 itself. Esports Charts said the Lower Bracket Final peaked at 5,594,138 concurrent viewers, then later ranked M7 at 5.68 million peak concurrent viewers for the quarter. That made the event the most-watched mobile esports tournament in history and gave MLBB the kind of one-event surge usually reserved for the biggest PC finals. M7 also set records on TikTok esports broadcasts and on Indonesian- and Bahasa Malaysia-language streams, a reminder that the game’s strongest viewing lanes are deeply rooted in Southeast Asia.

That regional base is the real story behind the spike. Esports Charts has said MLBB has been the world’s most popular mobile esports title every year since 2021, and the Q1 2026 result looks less like a one-off shock and more like the latest proof that mobile esports has built its own center of gravity. In 2024, MLBB already reached nearly 476 million hours watched, so the new quarter-wide lead was not built from nothing. M7 simply converted long-running dominance into a global watch-time crown.

MOONTON Games has spent the year backing that momentum with hard numbers. In late January 2026, the publisher said MLBB had passed 1.5 billion installations and 110 million monthly active users. It also laid out a 2026 esports roadmap that targets more than 70 regions, over 5,000 events, and more than 600 million hours watched. MLBB is also the first confirmed title for the inaugural Esports Nations Cup 2026 in Saudi Arabia, and it will debut as a medal event at the 20th Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026.

For mobile esports, that is the clearest sign yet that the category has moved beyond secondary-stage status. MLBB’s Q1 2026 lead was powered by M7, but the scale behind it suggests something bigger: a title with enough reach, broadcast depth, and local-language power to challenge the entire esports hierarchy, not just the mobile bracket.