The International 2022: most popular channels and impact of community casting

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The International 2022, the final championship of the Dota Pro Circuit 2021/2022 season, came to an end in late October. Previously, we summed up the overall results of the tournament and analyzed its statistics. In a new article, we will tell you about the most popular broadcast channels and take a look at the impact of community casting based on English and Russian streams.

Community casting is becoming more and more popular in the Russian segment of Dota 2, along with its increasing influence on the audience statistics of tournaments. People tend to prefer following esports matches on their favorite streamers' channels rather than the official coverage channels.

Official broadcasts are the main factor of Dota 2 tournaments success in terms of viewership statistics for a long time, while the community casting played only a secondary role. But in 2022, the situation began to change — particularly for the Russian language, which is one of the main languages for the community of the game. The positive dynamics of community casting can be seen in the Majors statistics, as well as in the performance of The International.

The percentage ratio of the English-language coverage of The International 2022 did not change much compared to last year. In the Russian-language segment, Hours Watched of the official broadcasts dropped significantly, while the same metric for community casting went up slightly. This led to the situation where independent Russian-language streamers accumulated 58% of the HW of the language's total at the tournament.

One of the reasons for this was the ownership of the Russian-language broadcasting rights for the Last Chance Qualifier and the TI11 Group Stage purchased by a new and as yet little-known studio, Fissure. The broadcast was held on the channels of its general sponsor, so many viewers chose the popular streamers and stayed with them for the whole tournament. Moreover, buster, one of the most popular Russian-language streamers on Twitch, was granted the right to broadcast the LCQ and the TI11 Group Stage. He hardly ever plays Dota 2, but his TI11 streams attracted a lot of viewers. Some matches of The International were also covered by Arthas — a popular streamer who earned a name in Dota 2 but stopped being interested in the game in recent years.

'The advantages of community casting are obvious. Ordinary tournaments attract new viewers with it, and the audience itself gets an alternative to official studios, which find themselves in a situation of increased competition: the average viewer surely benefits from this. But the disadvantages can be much more significant in the long run.

The growing popularity of community casting could hit hard studios that acquire Majors' and TI broadcast rights. Interest in the official dota2ti_ru channel has noticeably decreased compared to last year: only a small part of the audience switched to the official stream of the event after the group stage. It's one thing when community casters cover the Dota Pro Circuit regular season, TI qualifiers, or tournament finals. And it is quite another when they comment on all the matches of international tournaments.

The more popular individual esports streamers become, the further studios will fade into the background as they may lose motivation to improve content due to audience outflow.'

Artyom Odintsov, CEO of Esports Charts

The most popular channel that covered TI11 is the English-language dota2ti, which accumulated 12.6 million HW. It should be noted that this channel and others similar to it operated only during the tournament's Playoffs. The Russian-language dota2ti_ru (2nd) and betboom_ru (5th) are also in the Top 5 of official channels, with the English-language Dota 2 (YouTube) and PGL_Dota2 channels in between.

The Russian streamer Nix, who streamed without delay throughout the tournament, is second in the overall Top and first among independent streamers. Just_ns, a Russian-language streamer, who broadcasted with a delay until the start of the Playoffs, comes next in the community casters' Top. The English-speaking streamer Gorgc, the Tagalog-speaking streamer KuyaNic and the Indonesian channel WxC are also in the Top 5.

Despite the fact that TI11 lost to TI10 by all viewership metrics, the tournament was an incredible success for many coverage channels. For example, several official PGL, betboom and ESB channels, as well as the Ukrainian-language Maincast channel, set records for Peak Viewers. Nix, just_ns, Gorgc, Arthas and others can all show a similar achievement among the community casters.

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Based on the example of the Russian-language segment of The International 2022 coverage, it is clear that viewers often prefer to watch the streamers they know well, and are not eager to familiarize themselves with the unknown studio (besides that, many in the community had questions about its production & the quality of its talents work). In the English-language segment, everything is stable: the broadcasting rights are still owned by PGL and the community casting does not manage to draw viewers to itself.