M4 World Championship — format, schedule, regions

The mobile esports brawl will start in January! Moonton’s MOBA for smartphones called Mobile Legends: Bang Bang will host the M4 World Championship at the start of 2023 to determine the best team in the discipline. 

The event will include 16 teams from 12 regions which will get the spots in the tournament via professional leagues or dedicated qualifiers. The championship will be held in offline format with a venue in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and mobile esports as well. To clarify, this country is the most popular among mobile gamers and the viewership of mobile tournaments.

Participating regions

Moving on to the participants, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Brazil and MENA will select the participants according to the results of Mobile Legends Professional League (MPL) in each region. Myanmar, Turkey, North America, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam will have separate qualifying events, while Latin America dedicate the representative via MLBB Latam Super League.

Myanmar returns while CIS leaves the competition

What’s interesting, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Maynmar rejoined the competition after their absence during M3 World Championship. In past, Myanmar had its own MPL division, however, due to the political situation in the country, they paused their local esports competitions and missed the previous year’s main tournament.

The CIS region has also found itself in an unfortunate situation, as it stopped its activities allegedly due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The region previously managed to organize the first professional esports local Mythic League and determine the M3 participant, but due to the change in the political situation, the developers excluded CIS region from the competition.

Moreover, one of the strongest teams in CIS — Natus Vincere (the previous roster of Unique Devu), also hasn’t participated in esports competitions after M3. Most players of the team are from Russia, and as there are no tournaments for Russian squads, there’s no space to develop.

M4 World Championship will be held on January 1-15, 2023, and will feature an $800,000 prize pool, which is the same amount as the last year. More information about the format will be revealed soon. The participants of the competition haven’t been determined yet as the MPL is ongoing across the regions.

The previous M3 World Championship attracted 3,191,404 concurrent viewers according to Esports Charts, which is an incredible number of spectators across both PC and mobile esports tournaments, so it would be definitely interesting to see whether this year’s event will be able to break the record.

Header credit: Moonton