Asian Games esports: China top the table, 16 delegations win medals

The last esports medal of the 2026 Asian Games was awarded on Friday, October 2, when South Korea beat Chinese Taipei 3-0 in the League of Legends final, as Sheep Esports reported that day. It closed a program of eleven medal events played at Aichi Sky Expo, the exhibition center at the region's airport, in the suburbs of Nagoya, Japan. The Games themselves end on Sunday, October 4.

Counted from the results that Sheep Esports listed event by event, China finish first with three gold medals, ahead of Japan and South Korea with two each. Seven delegations won at least one title and 16 took home a medal, from a continent whose Olympic body, the Olympic Council of Asia, has 45 members.

Counted from the results listed by Sheep Esports for the eleven events, September 23 to October 2, 2026.

Eleven events, thirteen games

Esports is a recent addition to the Asian Games. It was a demonstration sport, meaning that its results did not count in the medal table, at the 18th Games in Jakarta and Palembang in 2018. It became a full medal sport at the Hangzhou Games, with seven titles, the Olympic Council of Asia recalled when it set the list for Aichi-Nagoya. The 2026 edition has four more.

That list was fixed long before the first match. On February 22, 2025, the Olympic Council of Asia announced that an emergency meeting of its executive board, held online that day, had unanimously approved eleven esports titles for the 20th Asian Games, scheduled in Aichi and Nagoya from September 19 to October 4, 2026.

Ten of the eleven are one game each: League of Legends, Honor of Kings, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, PUBG Mobile, Identity V, Naraka: Bladepoint, Pokemon Unite, Puyo Puyo Champions, Gran Turismo 7 and eFootball. The eleventh is a team competition in fighting games, which the council's list calls competitive martial arts. It is played over three games, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and The King of Fighters XV, and awards a single set of medals. That is how eleven events cover 13 games.

Teams do not enter as they would a tournament run by a publisher. Each represents a member of the Olympic Council of Asia, and the places are filled by invitation or through qualifiers. For League of Legends, Sheep Esports reported in August that two teams were invited and six came through a qualifier played in Kuala Lumpur in June.

The whole program fits into the Games' total of more than 450 medal events, according to Sheep Esports. The first esports medals were decided on September 23, in eFootball and Gran Turismo 7, and the last on October 2.

The winners, event by event

The results cover very different kinds of games: five-against-five strategy games on computer and on phones, a racing simulator, a football game, a puzzle game played one against one.

The fields were small by the standards of a continental championship. League of Legends, Naraka: Bladepoint and Identity V had eight teams each, Honor of Kings ten, PUBG Mobile twelve, according to Sheep Esports. The fighting games event gathered 13 teams of three players, one for each of the three games. In eFootball, 19 nations each sent two players who competed as a pair, 38 players in all, and Gran Turismo 7 had drivers from 15 nations.

The medal table

Put together, the eleven podiums give the following table. It is ordered as medal tables usually are: gold first, then silver, then bronze.

Three delegations share the largest haul, five medals each: Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Malaysia's count of one gold, two silver and two bronze was also given by Bernama, the Malaysian national news agency, on September 30, the day the country's last two medals were won. China and Chinese Taipei follow with four medals each, then Thailand and Saudi Arabia with three. The first five of those delegations hold 23 of the 42 medals between them. Chinese Taipei is the delegation with the most medals and no title: one silver, in League of Legends, and three bronzes.

The titles are spread widely. Seven delegations won gold, and four of them, Malaysia, Thailand, Iran and Myanmar, did so exactly once. For Iran and Myanmar that gold is the only esports medal of these Games.

China's four entries, and the others

China's place at the top comes from very few events. According to the list of participants that Sheep Esports published on August 10, China was entered in four of the eleven competitions. It won three of them, Naraka: Bladepoint, Honor of Kings and Identity V, and finished second in the fourth, PUBG Mobile, behind Thailand.

China was not in League of Legends, a game in which it won the 2018 event, the same report recalled; the outlet wrote that the absence had not been fully explained. In its absence South Korea took its second gold medal in a row in that game, and did not lose a single game on the way, Sheep Esports wrote on October 2.

The picture is close to that of the previous edition. At the Hangzhou Games, played in 2023, China led the esports table with four gold medals and one bronze, ahead of South Korea and Thailand, according to Sheep Esports. Three years later the same three delegations have a title again, and the first two places are separated by one gold medal.

Japan, the host, did not enter everything either. It withdrew from League of Legends and fielded no team in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Honor of Kings and Naraka: Bladepoint, Sheep Esports reported in August. That left seven events, and Japanese players reached the podium in five of them, with golds in Puyo Puyo Champions and Pokemon Unite, silvers in Identity V and in the fighting games team event, and a bronze in eFootball.

South Korea and Malaysia were each entered in nine events, by the same August count. Both finished with five medals. South Korea's two titles came in the fighting games team event and in League of Legends; Malaysia's came in Gran Turismo 7, with silver in eFootball and Honor of Kings and bronze in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Identity V.

Hong Kong was the most present delegation, entered in ten of the eleven events, every one except PUBG Mobile. It won two bronze medals, in Honor of Kings and in fighting games. At the other end of the scale, Sheep Esports listed Cambodia, Laos and Syria as playing a single game each.

A first title for Mobile Legends

One of the eleven titles was new to the medal program. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, a five-against-five game played on phones, was an official medal title at the Asian Games for the first time, its publisher Moonton said on June 22, in the year of the game's tenth anniversary.

Its field was decided in Singapore. A qualifier held at Resorts World Sentosa from June 18 to 21 sent 12 teams through, Moonton announced: five from Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar and Malaysia; three from West Asia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran; Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan from Central Asia; Mongolia and Hong Kong from South and East Asia.

The first gold medal went to Myanmar. Its team beat Malaysia 2-0 in the semifinal on September 30, Bernama reported, after Malaysia had eliminated Jordan by the same score in the quarterfinal. In the other semifinal Indonesia beat Mongolia 2-0, and in the final, played on October 1 as a best-of-seven, Myanmar won 4-0, according to Dot Esports. Indonesia took the silver medal, and Malaysia and Mongolia, the two losing semifinalists, the bronzes. Eleven teams played the tournament, not twelve: Iran withdrew before it began, the same outlet reported. Myanmar had come through the Singapore qualifier three months earlier, and leaves Japan with the first Asian Games gold medal ever awarded in the game.

What comes next

The Games close on October 4 in Nagoya, two days after the last esports final.

For national teams, the next large event has moved. The Esports Nations Cup, the competition between countries that the Esports Foundation had planned in Riyadh in November 2026, was postponed on August 18 to November 2027, without exact dates.

The place of esports at the Asian Games themselves was discussed during the fortnight. The Olympic Council of Asia signed a host city contract with Kuwait on September 19 for the first Asian Esports and Mind Sports Games, to be held in 2027. On September 28 it stated that it had taken no decision to remove esports from the Asian Games, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported from Nagoya that day.

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