On October 26, Tencent's Honor of Kings (Arena of Valor in some regions) official Weibo declared that a new game from the IP is going to be announced on October 30 at 20:30. The announcement was brief, and hinted players can "Meet more friends beyond Honor of Kings".
Based on previous public information and recruitment listings from related studios on open-world projects, insiders believe that the new game from Honor of Kings IP is very likely to be an open-world RPG type of game in order to catch the trend started by Genshin Impact.
Despite being six years old, Honor of Kings is still Tencent's most popular game, even being the most profitable mobile game globally this September according to Sensor Tower. It is the biggest mobile game by active player count, and players have spent more than 10 billion USD since its launch in 2015, making it the highest-grossing mobile game of all time. Just in the first half of 2021, Honor of Kings has already bagged 1.5 billion USD in revenue for Tencent, accounting for 11.2% of the company’s total video game revenue.
However, Genshin Impact is a quickly rising star and has been holding the title of most grossing on the monthly charts, several months in a row, showing the wind is starting to change. As such, it is not difficult to understand why Tencent wants to test the waters in the mobile open-world action RPG genre with their most popular IP.
Two new Honor of Kings titles were announced back in November 2020: Codename: Departure and Codename: Breaking Dawn. A few days ago, Tencent started recruiting closed testers for a "new action title of Honor of Kings IP", and this would very likely be Tencent’s first answer to Genshin Impact.