Tarik outperforms Kamet0 and Ibai as VCT Leagues 2023's most popular community caster

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Community casting is an important component of any esports discipline, but Riot Games started actively cooperating with independent streamers just recently. For many years, the company covered its League of Legends tournaments on its own but changed the approach in Valorant in order to expand the audience. This turned out to be very successful, and now Riot has completely changed its policy regarding community casting.

The first season of VCT Leagues 2023 is now over, with the Americas division having the biggest audience, thanks to the efforts of Tarik, the most popular community caster in the discipline. Esports Charts has analyzed what role independent streamers played in each league's results.

VCT 2023 Americas Community Casting

As mentioned before, Americas became the most popular division among Valorant affiliate leagues. Moreover, the American event had the highest share of community casting of all the leagues: independent streamers accumulated a total of 22.7 million Hours Watched, which is 63.4% of the league's total. 

A single streamer, Tarik from Sentinels, a US-based former professional CS:GO player, provided a significant advantage in favor of community casting. He amassed 9.4 million Hours Watched and drew 136K Peak Viewers. Among the official channels, the most watched one was the English-language Twitch channel valorant_americas, it accumulated about 3.6 million Hours Watched.

Tarik's streams drew more viewers than some of the official broadcasts combined. In addition to Tarik, other well-known content creators, many of whom are official streamers for the clubs in the league, also broadcast VCT 2023 Americas matches. For example, Brazilians Coreano and Coringa covered matches of LOUD, while the former Sentinels player and streamer sinatraa broadcast matches of top American teams against Brazilian teams. However, none of these streamers succeeded in entering the Top 5 of the league's most popular channels. 

VCT 2023 EMEA Community Casting

In the VCT 2023 EMEA, community casting accumulated more Hours Watched than the official broadcasts just like in Americas, but the ratio was equal: 54.2% vs. 45.7%, respectively. 

In contrast to America, the most watched broadcast channel in the European league is the official Valorant_emea, it accumulated 3.9 million HW. Interestingly, the most popular channel (by concurrent viewership) was wtcn, Turkish community caster & co-owner of BBL Esports reached 119.3K PV.

Two channels of independent streamers entered the Top 5 of the most watched ones in VCT 2023 EMEA, in addition to wtcn, Spanish ibai (the owner of KOI) entered it. Frenchman Kamet0 (owner of Karmine Corp) was very close to the Top 5, but was a little short in terms of Hours Watched (and ranked third among all channels in terms of Peak Viewers). 

It is interesting that all of these clubs with great media support in the form of top streamers performed quite poorly in the league. BBL Esports, Karmine Corp, KOI and Team Heretics ended up at the bottom of the standings and did not make it to the playoffs. If they had been more successful, the EMEA league could have gotten a lot more views thanks to community casting. 

VCT 2023 Pacific Community Casting

VCT 2023 Pacific became the only one of the three affiliate leagues where official broadcasts gained more Hours Watched than the community casting, with a ratio of 65.5% to 34.4%. In terms of audience reach, VCT 2023 Pacific lagged behind VCT 2023 Americas but managed to surpass VCT 2023 EMEA.

The most watched channel for broadcasts in VCT 2023 Pacific is the official Twitch channel valorant_jpn, with 4.9 million Hours Watched. The leader by Peak Viewers, however, is the official VALORANT Japan channel on YouTube, with 80.4K Peak Viewers. Overall, Japan once again demonstrated that local fans are very interested in Valorant and actively follow esports tournaments. What is more disappointing is that Japanese teams performed poorly in the Pacific league and did not earn a quota for VCT 2023: Masters Tokyo, not a single player from Japan will perform at the home tournament.

Just like other leagues, VCT 2023 Pacific had several popular community casters, among whom jasper7se from Crazy Raccoon stood out: he became the only independent streamer to make it into the Top 5 most-watched channels of the league. The first four places are taken by channels with official English & Japanese broadcasts.

Combining the statistics of the three regions into a single chart, one can see that official broadcasts and community casting gained almost the same amount of watch time: 42.8 million and 39.2 million hours, respectively. Community castings slightly exceeded the broadcasts by the organizers, but quite insignificantly, in a ratio of 52.2% to 47.8%.

In the combined top channels, Tarik leads both by Hours Watched and Peak Viewers among all channels and streamers. Interestingly, three independent EMEA streamers — wtcn, kamet0, and ibai — made it into the Top 5 channels by Peak Viewers. They attracted from 97K to 119K viewers, but this had almost no impact on the region's popularity in the long run as streamers mainly covered only their team's performance while Tarik watched & streamed almost all matches of the American league.

Tarik's Airtime on VCT 2023 Americas broadcasts was just over 161 hours. This is more than wtcn, ibai, Kamet0, and jasper7se combined. This helped VCT 2023 Americas become a leader in Average Viewers and Hours Watched among the regions.

The next major tournament for the discipline will be Valorant Champions Tour 2023: Masters Tokyo. The event is set to be held from June 11 to 25. The best 12 teams from the three regions will compete for a million-dollar prize pool. Among the participants are 10 representatives from the affiliate leagues of Americas, EMEA, and Pacific, as well as two Chinese teams from the FGC Valorant Invitational 2023: Act 1.