If you think your smartphone is just a simple mobile phone to play random, casual games – we are here to tell that is not the case. But it’s no surprise you would think that. This is why, today, we decided to show just how popular mobile eSport games can be!
Esports on mobile are steadily increasing in terms of popularity in recent years. While mobile esport games have to work harder to garner enough popularity to be at least competitive with the top-level PC esports, they nevertheless attract a big crowd of people due to large amount of money in their tournaments. In this article, we try to answer a few questions on mobile esports games: What is the most viewed esports game? And which one has the largest prize pool?
What are the most viewed mobile eSport Games on mobile?
I often hear that mobile games don’t garner a huge audience. The numbers below should put that statement to rest. The top 10 mobile eSports games have had users sit in front of their screens and accumulated well over 200 million hours of watch time. So if you’re wonder what the most watched mobile eSport game is, we have that list for you.
- Arena of Valor 72+ million hours viewed
- PUBG Mobile 55+ million hours viewed
- Free Fire 38+ million hours viewed
- Mobile Legends: Bang Bang 29+ million hours viewed
- Clash Royale 5+ million hours viewed
What is the number 1 mobile eSport with the biggest prize pool?
Here are a few of the most popular games ranked according to their prize money in their international tournaments. After the table, you can read snippets of information on each of the games in the list!
| Game Name | Launch Date | Prize Pool ($) |
| Magic the Gathering | 2017 | 500K |
| Mobile Legends: Bang Bang | 2016 | 800K |
| Brawl Stars | 2017 | 1 Million |
| Clash of Clans | 2012 | 1 Million |
| Clash Royale | 2016 | 1.02 Million |
| Call of Duty: Mobile | 2019 | 2 Million |
| Garena Free Fire | 2017 | 2 Million |
| Arena of Valor | 2016 | 2.2 Million |
| Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds | 2018 | 5 Million |
9. Magic: The Gathering Arena
The popular TCG by Wizards of the Coast (WotC), where you can gather cards through booster packs present as IAP.
This game was released in beta on November 2017 with a full release coming about two years later, in September 2019 for Android users. iOS saw the full release in 2020.
Magic: The Gathering follows the same rules as the physical card game. Players play against others and select a deck of cards and try to reduce the opponents’ life points. The player who loses all their health points loses the game.
The prize for Magic: The Gathering Arena world championship in 2021 reached $500,000.
8. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
Mobile Massively Online Battle Arena, Mobile Legends is becoming the most trendiest game in Southeast Asia. with the game being one of the first few MOBAs on mobile.
Two teams fight against each other to reach the top. The player who destroys an enemy first and demolishes their base wins the game.
This game started with ten heroes in its early release, and after one year number of heroes increased to 70. Nowadays that number surpasses 100.
This game was released worldwide on Android on July 14, 2016, and iOS on November 9, 2016. The total revenue earned by this game now is almost $1 billion (read that in Frieza’s voice).
The Prize money for the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang World Championship 2021 is almost $800,000.
7. Brawl Stars
Brawl Stars is developed and published by mobile gaming’s dearest: “Supercell.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Supercell is also the developer of two other games that appear on our list, with “Clash of Clans” and “Clash Royale” following shortly.
Brawl Stars was released worldwide on December 12, 2017. This game generated total gross revenue of around $400 million one year after its release.
The Prize money for the Brawl Star world championship 2021 was $1 million.
6. Clash of Clans
Clash of Clans is a tribe fighting game with the player acting as the king of the tribe. The game revolves around engaging in combat with other tribes in order to “permanently rehouse” their resources. SuperCell took old browser games, increased their production budged by a factor of 100 and streamlined the gameplay. And for them it paid off massively with the game holding comfortable top chart positions on both App Stores.
This game has been free to play on iOS since August 12, 2012, and on Android Since October 7, 2013.
The prize money of Clash of Clans World Championship 2021 was $1 million.
5. Clash Royale
Last entry from Super Cell on our list is Clash Royale. A tower defense game sporting player vs player matches with teams of up to two players. Each game lasts a total of 3 minutes and ends if a player loses the king tower. An extra two minutes of gameplay are added in case the timer counts down to zero and the game is undecided.
The prize money for the Clash Royale World Championship 2021 is $1.02 million.
4. Call of Duty: Mobile
COD: Mobile is published by the gaming giant, Activision for both iOS and Android as a Free To Play game. Up to 100 players can join in its battle royal mode and form teams of up to 4.
This game was released on October 1, 2019 and had a record launch, one of the biggest in the history of esports mobile games, probably due to the popularity of its PC counterpart. Total revenue set a record of $480 million within one year of its release and over 270 million downloads.
The prize money for Call of Duty Mobile World Championship 2021 stood at a record breaking $2 million.
3. Garena Free Fire
Garena Free Fire was developed and published by Garena and was voted “Best Popular Vote Game” in 2019. In 2020, this game broke all other game records globally, with 80 million active users daily.
Free Fire is an online battle-royale game in which up to 50 players can participate on an online map. The main objective of this game is to land on an island, search for weapons, medical equipment and other enemy players. The game map starts narrowing down with the time, and the last player or team standing last can win the match.
This game was released globally on August 23, 2017 and as of 2019, it earned a grossed revenue of almost $1 Billion.
The prize money for the Garena Free Fire World Championship 2021 is $2 Million US Dollars.
2. Arena of Valor / King of Glory
Arena of Valor, of AoV for short, is a MOBA game published by Level Infinite and TiMi Studios, with Garena and DeNA undertaking the publisher mantle in some of the regions the game’s available in.
AoV is a “true MOBA”, similar to games such as League of Legends and DOTA with characters from many Intelectual Properties available world wide such as Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and The Joker.
This game generated a whopping total of 10 billion US Dollars since its release in 2016, with 2021 alone accounting for more than $2 Billion.
The Prize money of its annual Championship is almost $2.2 Million US Dollars.
1. PUBG Mobile
Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is one of, if not the, biggest eSports title on our list, in terms of revenue, at least! We’ve already covered it in our Top 10 Mobile Games that Take skill article where it holds the pole position.
The game was released in March 2018 for both Android and IOS, achieving 1 billion downloads by March 2021. This mobile game also grossed the highest in 2020 with $2.6 billion and surpassing $6.2 billion in revenue by December 2021.
The annual prize money of Player’s Unknown Battle Ground Mobile is around about $5 Million US Dollars.
Where to next?
Congrats, you made it to the end of the article. I hope it was beneficial to you. It’s also beneficial to us to have you stick around the blog more. We have more articles that could be of use, such as this one, which teaches you how to run iOS or iPad OS games on a Mac.
If you want to stay up to date with our articles, make sure to give us a follow on twitter. Or, leave a comment bellow telling us what games you think should have made the list.
You can also check out our coverage of other iOS games just released for your smartphone. Thank you for visiting Best Smartphone Games, I sincerely hope we’ve been of service!