Malaysia Came Out of the Asian Games Esports Qualifiers With Five Titles and Singapore With None

Esports at the Asian Games is held at the Aichi International Exhibition Center in Tokoname from 23 September to 2 October. Twenty-three nations are entered, across 13 game titles contested as 11 medal events.

Six of those titles held regional qualifiers in May and June, staged in Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Malaysia came out of them with entries in five: League of Legends, Honor of Kings, Mobile Legends, Identity V and Naraka Bladepoint. Only Vietnam and Indonesia matched that tally. Thailand qualified in four, missing League of Legends and Mobile Legends but taking a place in PUBG Mobile. Singapore, which hosted one leg of the qualifiers, qualified in none of the six.

The pattern follows where each country's competitive infrastructure actually sits. Malaysia has a domestic Mobile Legends league in its eighteenth season and a long-established League of Legends presence. Thailand's strength is concentrated in battle royale titles. Singapore's scene is built around Valorant and Counter-Strike, and neither game is on the Asian Games programme.

The eleven medal events are eFootball, Gran Turismo 7, Honor of Kings, Naraka Bladepoint, Puyo Puyo Champions, Identity V, League of Legends, Mobile Legends, Pokemon Unite, PUBG Mobile, and a combined Competitive Martial Arts event covering Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and The King of Fighters XV.

That last event is the structural oddity of the programme. Three separate fighting games, each with its own professional circuit and its own world champions, are collapsed into a single medal. It is the sort of compromise that gets a discipline onto a multi-sport calendar, and it means a Tekken specialist and a Street Fighter specialist end up competing for the same piece of metal.

Esports was approved as a medal sport for this edition of the Games in July 2023.