Most popular community casters in esports

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Community casting is a very important part of covering certain esports tournaments and even entire disciplines. Independent streamers often gather more viewers than official broadcasts, thanks to either their personal brand, the informal atmosphere of streams, professional insights (often with former esports players as co-streamers), or all of these factors combined. Sometimes, the presence or absence of just one streamer can significantly alter the viewership statistics of a tournament.

In this article, we have gathered the 10 most popular community casters from the leading disciplines, who have accumulated the highest watch time in the first half of 2023.

The most viewed community caster in the first half of 2023 is Tarik. The American streamer covers all major Valorant tournaments and accumulated over 31.7 million Hours Watched in six months. Tarik often gathers more viewers on his channel than the official broadcasts. His numbers could have been even higher, but he rarely streams matches outside of his home region, NA.

In the second place is Nix, a Russian Dota 2 streamer. He amassed 18.5 million Hours Watched in the first half of the year and became the undisputed leader in his discipline. It is important to note that community casting is highly developed in Dota 2, and there is always high competition among independent streamers for the audience. Interestingly, other Dota 2 community casters such as just_ns from Russia and Gorgc from Sweden have also made it to the Top 10 of the ranking. Together with Nix, they followed Dota Pro Circuit 2023 regional leagues and Valve majors.

In the Top 3 community casters is Scump, former professional Call of Duty player from the US, who retired and started covering tournaments in the discipline. In six months, his Twitch channel accumulated 15.7 million HW. If we look at the proportions rather than the numbers, Scump is gradually approaching nearly half of the total Hours Watched in all Call of Duty tournaments.

Korean streamer phonics1 is the most popular community caster for League of Legends. He covers LCK matches on AfreecaTV, and he accumulated 10.4 million HW in the first half of the year. It is also worth noting that there are other community casters for League of Legends in the Top, such as German caedrel and Spaniard ibai.

Indonesian YouTube streamer MARSHA OZAWA has become the most popular community caster for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. In the first half of 2023, his streams accumulated 9.8 million HW. It is noteworthy that among all the streamers in the Top 10, only MARSHA OZAWA and phonics1 streamed on platforms other than Twitch.

The leader among community casters in CS:GO is German streamer ohnepixel, who broadcasts in English. In six months, he amassed approximately 8.3 million HW, covering IEM Dallas 2023, BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023, IEM Rio 2023, and other tournaments. We have not included Brazilian streamer Gaules in the Top as he is de facto the official Portuguese caster for many tournaments.

Community casting is now used in almost all esports disciplines, including those where organizers only relied on official studios until recently (for example, in major League of Legends tournaments). Interestingly, top streamers often don't limit themselves to covering just one specific discipline. For example, Tarik sometimes streams CS:GO tournaments, Scump covers Halo championships, and ibai actively follows his team KOI in Valorant tournaments. Even Nobru, a popular Brazilian Free Fire player, has covered tournaments in PUBG Mobile, the main competitor to his discipline.

Also read: What is community casting and how does it affect esports viewership?