Mobile Legends: Bang Bang‘s second World Championship featuring a prize pool of $300,000 will be held in Singapore in January 2021, according to a press release from the mobile MOBA’s publisher, Moonton.
The event is co-organized by Singapore’s Cybersports and Online Gaming Association and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board. The tournament will be the first offline esports event held in the Southeast Asia region in the new year. The M2 World Championship will remain a closed-door event, however, meaning that the only way to tune in will be virtually.
More information about the tournament will be released in the coming weeks. The M1 World Championship was held in November 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, featuring 16 teams and a $250,000 prize pool.
The event drew over 648,000 peak viewers and 162,000 average viewers, according to Esports Charts. The game’s viewer base was dominated by Southeast Asian countries, with most opting to tune in to Indonesian and Malay language broadcasts.
“Mobile Legends traces much of its global success today to its roots in Southeast Asia,” Justin Yuan, co-founder and chief executive of Moonton said. “This will be our most exciting event ever as our top players embark on this epic journey to battle it out in Singapore.”
The game’s SEA player base is particularly fervent, having earned 61 percent of its lifetime revenue in the region according to a January 2020 report from Sensor Tower. Of its 281.3 million downloads, more than half can be attributed to the top three countries, all from SEA-Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
