PGL Arlington Major 2022 — the most popular channels & dynamics of community casting

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August 14th marked the end of PGL Arlington Major 2022, the second and last major in the Dota Pro Circuit 2021/2022 season. Previously, we have already summed up general viewership of the tournament, and now we want to share deeper analytics and interesting facts about particular broadcasts. Read about all this in the new Esports Charts article.

Dynamics of community casting

Russian and English are the main languages of Dota 2 esports scene, as they gather the most viewers on tournament broadcasts. We will detail how the ratio between official streams and community casting has changed for these languages over the past four majors.

Of the last four majors, the PGL Arlington Major has become the most popular among the Russian-speaking community. Broadcasts of matches in Russian generated 14.2 million Hours Watched, of which 26% were generated by official broadcasts and 74% by community casting. The least popular tournament was One Esports Singapore, the Russian-language broadcasts of which generated only 6.1 million Hours Watched, and official streams amassed almost 5 million HW from the total by language.

What about the ratio between official streams and community casting? While the vast majority of Russian-speaking viewers preferred to watch the official broadcast (81% and 79% of Hours Watched respectively) at the One Esports Singapore and WePlay AniMajor, during ESL One Stockholm and PGL Arlington Major most of the audience switched to community casters (55% and 74% of Hours Watched, respectively). During the PGL Arlington Major, Russian-language broadcasts generated 14.2M Hours Watched, of which 10.4 million were generated by community casters and only 3.7 million by the official broadcasts. In other words, the situation made a 180-degree turn: the audience began to turn away from the official broadcasts in favor of their favorite streamers.

What is the reason for such changes? The largest outflow of audience from official Russian-language broadcasts occurred after the start of the war in Ukraine. In particular, the Ukrainian casters refused to stream in Russian and began to broadcast in Ukrainian. On the other hand, there was a split among Russian casters: for example, in April, five commentators left RuHub studio at once: Adekvat, Eiritel, Lex, Mila, and Inmate. As a result, the official studios ceased to be the main point of attraction for viewers and were quickly superseded by community casters.

The situation wasn’t as skewed for English-language broadcasts. Official streams in this language have always attracted many more viewers than community casting. The ratio ranged from 93%-to-7% to 82%-to-18%. There was still a slight increase in the popularity of the community casting, but not as significant as in the Russian-speaking segment, where the ratio reversed.

Most popular channels of PGL Arlington Major

PGL Arlington Major took the lead among the last four majors in terms of the total number of channels that covered the tournament matches: a total of 179 channels. The main official English channel of the PGL Arlington Major, pgl_dota2 on Twitch, gathered 152K Peak Viewers and generated 7.1 million Hours Watched (21% of the total). Official Russian-language channel betboom_ru gathered 93.9K Peak Viewers and generated 3.1 million Hours Watched (9.3% of the total).

The top 5 most watched official streams included the 4DEsports channel on the Facebook Gaming platform, which was broadcasting in Spanish. It should be reminded that the 4DEsoirts tournament operator organized and covered the regional league DPC 2021/2022 in South America. Closing the top 5 was the dota2mc_ua channel from the Maincast studio, which broadcasted in Ukrainian. It generated 675K Hours Watched and gathered 16.6K Peak Viewers.

Things are a bit more interesting when it comes to community casting. Nix became the most popular streamer among the Russian-speaking audience, as his channel generated 5.2 million Hours Watched and gathered 150K Peak Viewers. For Nix, this was an all-time personal record on Twitch. It should be noted that although Nix is considered a community caster, he had official permission from BetBoom (the main partner of the Russian-language broadcast) to stream matches without a 15-minute delay. The same privilege was enjoyed by TpaBoMaH, whose channel generated 933K Hours Watched and 21.7K Peak Viewers.

The second most popular Russian-speaking caster was NS: his channel generated 2.9 million Hours Watched and 53.3K Peak Viewers. At the same time, NS streamed matches with a delay (unlike Nix and TpaBoMaH).

The broadcast of the popular Ukrainian streamer Arthas on the Trovo platform deserves a separate mention. One of the betting companies paid Papich a considerable amount for advertising on the Dota 2 tournament broadcast. After much persuasion, the streamer agreed to watch several matches, which gathered 28.3K Peak Viewers on his channel. Interestingly, the Peak Viewers mark was reached during the RNG match against the Outsiders, and not during the grand final, like in the case of other community streamers.

The Swedish streamer Gorgc once again became the most popular among the English-speaking community casters: his channel generated 1.3 million Hours Watched and 28.3K Peak Viewers. The top 5 casters by audience reach also included the Nepalese YouTuber Admiral Morph, champion of The International 2015 Fear, German Team Liquid streamer and former pro player Qojqva, as well as commentator Ephey from Jordan.

Most popular channels of PGL Arlington Major

Twitch became the main platform of the PGL Arlington Major with 25.4 million Hours Watched and 537.4K Peak Viewers. At the same time, it gathered more than 230K Average Viewers. YouTube holds the second spot with 5.2 million Hours Watched and 115.2K Peak Viewers. Facebook Gaming generated 2.4 million and 65K, respectively.

Across all four majors, the situation is as follows: Twitch is constantly increasing its audience reach from tournament to tournament. After gathering 134K Peak Viewers at One Esports Singapore, Twitch has already reached the 230K Peak Viewers mark in Arlington.

The dynamics shown by YouTube are rather uneven. The platform peaked at WePlay AniMajor, gathering 56.9K Peak Viewers. During the PGL Arlington Major, this figure has decreased to 47.7K. The situation regarding the Facebook Gaming platform is also interesting: during all the last four majors, the number of viewers there remained practically unchanged and kept at around the 21-22K mark.

Records

During the PGL Arlington Major, several records (mostly for Dota 2 Majors) by languages, platforms, and channels were set. Here is a brief rundown of some of these:

• A record for Hispanic broadcasts of Majors: 87.9K viewers during OG's match against Beastcoast. The previous record of 80.4K was set at ESL One Stockholm (+8.72%).

• Record for Majors at Portuguese broadcast: 22.7K viewers during OG's match against Thunder Awaken. The previous record of 20.4K was set at The Kiev Major (+11.12%). It's the best viewership by language in the discipline, excluding TI.

• A record for Majors at Ukrainian-language broadcasts: 16.6K viewers during the PSG.LGD match against Team Spirit in the grand final of the tournament. The previous record of 4.7K was set at WePlay AniMajor (+254.6%).

• A record for Dota 2 esports Peak Viewership on Trovo: 29.6K viewers on the stream of Arthas, when he watched the RNG match against the Outsiders. The previous record of 7.1K was set at ESL One Stockholm (+313%).

• A record for Peak Viewership on the Nix channel: 153.3K viewers during the PSG.LGD match against Team Spirit in the grand final of the tournament. In the same match, TpaBoMaH also set a Peak Viewership record of 23.6K viewers.

***

The next major Dota 2 tournament will be ESL One Malaysia 2022, which will be held on August 23-28. After that, the teams will start preparing for The International 2022. Qualifiers will take place in six regions on September 3-18, and the main stage of the World Championship will take place on October 15-30.