Mobile is the majority, and Western coverage still writes as if it isn't

Compile a top-fifty list of online games honestly and a fifth of it is mobile, most of that is Asian, and a good chunk of it will be unfamiliar to a European or American reader who considers themselves well informed about games. That gap is worth examining.

Honor of Kings is the highest-grossing mobile game ever made. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is a medal event at the SEA Games and fills arenas across the Philippines and Indonesia. Free Fire is among the most downloaded games in history, with its largest markets in Brazil and India. None of them get a fraction of the coverage that a mid-tier PC shooter receives on launch week.

Why the gap exists

Partly language and market focus — most English-language games media is staffed and funded to serve English-speaking audiences. Partly platform snobbery, which is real and which the industry has never fully shaken. And partly the genuine difficulty of covering games whose international releases differ substantially from their domestic ones, as Honor of Kings' do.

But the effect is that a large share of the actual global online gaming population is treated as a footnote, and readers end up with a distorted picture of what the medium looks like.

Not a case for uncritical praise

This is not an argument that these games are above criticism. Free Fire sells characters with combat abilities, which is direct pay-for-power aimed at a young audience with limited disposable income, and we mark it down hard for exactly that. Mobile Legends' emblem system puts account-level statistical advantages behind grind or payment. These are serious criticisms and they belong in the review.

The point is that they belong in a review at all — that these games should be assessed on the same terms as everything else rather than dismissed as a separate, lesser category. Honor of Kings solved touchscreen MOBA controls in a way that deserves study. Its fifteen-minute match length is arguably the best structural decision anyone in the genre has made this decade, and both League and Dota would be better games if they had made it.

Our list has eight mobile-first entries in it. Given the actual distribution of players worldwide, that is still probably too few.