China Sweeps Into the Honor of Kings Asian Games Final — With State Television Along for the Ride
China's national Honor of Kings squad beat the Philippines 2-0 in the Nagoya Asian Games semifinal and will meet Malaysia for gold — a title defence staged, for the first time, with CCTV broadcasting every match to a national audience.
China's Honor of Kings national squad will play for Asian Games gold after sweeping the Philippines 2-0 in Monday's semifinal in Nagoya, setting up a final against Malaysia a few hours later. A win would defend the title China won when esports first appeared at the Asian Games as a medal event, in Hangzhou in 2023.
The road through the group stage was as dominant as the semifinal: China beat Laos 2-0 in its opening match and never dropped a series on the way to the last four. What makes this run different from Hangzhou three years ago is not the scoreboard but the cameras. State broadcaster CCTV put the semifinal on its main CCTV5 channel and moved the final to CCTV5+, with streaming through the CCTV Sports app — a scheduling choice that treats a mobile game played by hundreds of millions of Chinese the same way it treats table tennis or diving.
Honor of Kings, Tencent's five-versus-five battle arena built on Romance of the Three Kingdoms-era heroes, is the most-played mobile game in China, and its professional league, KPL, has spent years lobbying for mainstream legitimacy. The Asian Games is that argument's biggest stage. The game's own accounts leaned into it: the official KPL account, which posted the broadcast schedule, urged followers to "gather friends and family to witness the gold-medal match", and the club account of pro team Hangzhou LGD, whose player Wang Ke is on the national squad, tracked each round. A post announcing the semifinal win drew tens of thousands of interactions within hours.
There is a clock ticking underneath the celebration. This is the last Asian Games at which esports sits inside the main programme: after Nagoya, the discipline moves to a standalone esports event in Kuwait in 2027, and its Olympic future remains unwritten. For the players — many of them KPL stars in their early twenties — Monday's final is therefore not just a title defence but the closing argument of a four-year campaign to be treated as athletes. When the site covered that departure last week, the question was whether the Games would keep them; the question on the stage in Nagoya is whether anyone can stop them.
The final begins at 13:00 Beijing time, on national television.