HLTV Community Awards 2025: Power-Ranking the Hype Around Every Category

The HLTV Community Awards are back for the 2025 season – five fan-voted trophies for Talent, Event, Creator, Streamer and Skin of the Year, all presented by 1xBet and Skin.Club. Voting is once again 100% decided by HLTV users, with two voting rounds in late December and the winners revealed live at the HLTV Awards 2025 show in Belgrade’s Sava Centar on January 10, 2026.

Below is a ranking-style breakdown of how each category is set up, who’s nominated, and how this all fits into the wider HLTV Awards ecosystem – plus context from related news and a few key quotes from players and creators.

How the Community Awards voting works

Two-stage vote.

Round 1: Dec 16, 12:00 – Dec 23, 00:00 CET – ten nominees per category get cut down to three finalists.

Round 2: Dec 24, 12:00 – Dec 31, 00:00 CET – the final community winners are decided.

Who can vote? Only HLTV users whose accounts were created before the article with the nominees went live are allowed to vote, to reduce botting and last-second spam accounts.

Where are the winners crowned? All five Community Awards will be handed out on stage at the HLTV Awards 2025 ceremony in Belgrade’s Sava Centar, a newly renovated venue that can host around 1000 guests from the Counter-Strike scene.

Why it matters: Last year, community picks like BanKs (Talent), Perfect World Shanghai Major (Event), NadeKing (Creator), ohnePixel (Streamer) and AK-47 | Inheritance (Skin) became part of HLTV Awards history – and some of those names are back in the mix again.

1. Talent of the Year – The S-Tier Workhorses

Methodology: HLTV built this list using a point-based system:

2 points for every 2+ week S-tier LAN.

1 point for other S-tier events.
A tie around 9th place meant the “top 10” ballooned into 12 names this year.

Nominees (ordered by S-tier event points):

Freya “Freya” Spiers

Harry “JustHarry” Russell

Hugo “Hugo” Byron

Jacob “Pimp” Winneche

Chad “SPUNJ” Burchill

Alex “Machine” Richardson

James “BanKs” Banks

Janko “YNk” Paunović

Mohan “launders” Govindasamy

Conner “Scrawny” Girvan

Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg

Tres “stunna” Saranthus

Why this category is stacked

BanKs is the defending community champion. He won Talent of the Year 2024 with 24.5% of the vote, edging out SPUNJ and Scrawny, after working an incredible 23 events across roles like stage host, interviewer and desk host.

SPUNJ + Scrawny + launders are the core of some of the most-watched international broadcasts, from Majors to big ESL and BLAST events, and were already finalists in earlier HLTV Awards editions.

Mauisnake and stunna represent the newer wave of English-language analysts and hosts that have become mainstays on big S-tier desks.

Connected storylines

HLTV’s broader awards coverage this year has been heavily shaped by how the game’s biggest stages feel on camera. Articles like “Who is leading the race for the HLTV Awards?” outline which players are frontrunners and also tease the importance of the broadcast around them.

You can see the same production-and-talent focus in 2024 retrospectives, where the Perfect World Shanghai Major was praised for its event experience and ultimately won Event of the Year in the Community Awards.

2. Event of the Year – Ranking the Arenas

Criteria:

Only S-tier LANs.

No online events, no group-stage-only appearances, and no tournaments without a live crowd.

Maximum of two events per tournament organizer, chosen using data from Esports Charts: peak viewers and hours watched divided by airtime.

Nominees (chronological order):

IEM Katowice 2025

PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025

PGL Astana 2025

BLAST.tv Austin Major

IEM Cologne 2025

FISSURE Playground 2

BLAST Rivals 2025 Season 2

StarLadder Budapest Major 2025

How 2024 set the bar

Last year’s community winner, Perfect World Shanghai Major, beat out PGL Copenhagen and IEM Katowice with 38% of the vote and delivered some of the most memorable highlights of the year, including iconic plays from KSCERATO, skullz and donk.

That win raised expectations for all 2025 contenders: atmosphere, production values and storylines now matter as much as raw viewership.

Players on how Majors shape everything

Ahead of the Budapest Major playoffs, stars have openly talked about how previous events changed their perspective. Falcons rifler NiKo summed up his own journey from heartbreak to resilience:

“We learned our lesson from the Austin Major,”

he said in an HLTV interview, explaining how a tough campaign made Falcons more prepared for the current Major run.

Quotes like that highlight why the BLAST.tv Austin Major and StarLadder Budapest Major loom so large in the Event of the Year conversation – they’re not just tournaments, they’re turning points in teams’ seasons.

3. Creator of the Year – YouTube’s Counter-Strike Braintrust

To build the Creator of the Year shortlist, HLTV partnered with Stream Hatchet. They filtered for channels that were primarily Counter-Strike content and then ranked creators by a mix of views, engagement and average watch time across 2025, leaving ten nominees.

Nominees (alphabetical):

3kliksphilip

Anomaly

bysTaXx

Cachorro1337

dima_aimbots

Murzofix

NadeKing

shoke

Sparkles

Virre CS2

(HLTV lists 10 names; the exact set includes region-defining content creators from Europe and Brazil via their YouTube links.)

How previous winners frame this race

3kliksphilip won the Creator of the Year community award in 2023, recognized for his analytical and educational videos.

NadeKing took over in 2024, beating 3kliksphilip and Virre; HLTV’s winners recap notes that he secured the title ahead of those two finalists.

During the 2024 ceremony, Esports.gg’s coverage highlighted a memorable line from NadeKing’s acceptance speech: he joked that “anyone can be NadeKing,” leaning into the anonymous persona he uses on camera.

That back-to-back storyline – 3kliksphilip in 2023, NadeKing in 2024 – gives the 2025 Creator of the Year vote a strong “rubber-match” feel, especially with both back as nominees.

4. Streamer of the Year – Live-Content Kings

Streamer of the Year also uses Stream Hatchet’s data, but this time focused on Twitch-style live content: airtime, total watch time, peak viewers and average concurrency, again limited to streamers who mainly broadcast Counter-Strike.

Nominees (alphabetical):

Vadim “Evelone192” Kozakov

Erik “fl0m” Flom

Luciano “forg1” Forgione

Alexandre “gAuLeS” Chiqueta

Ömer “imoRR” Karataş

Piotr “izak” Skowyrski

Justinas “jL” Lekavicius

Sebastien “KRL” Perez

Mark “ohnePixel” Zimmermann

Ivan “StRoGo” Shurpatov

Why ohnePixel is the benchmark

HLTV’s 2024 Community Awards recap shows just how dominant ohnePixel has been:

He won Streamer of the Year with 40.7% of the vote,

It was his second straight community award in the category, ahead of fl0m and dima_wallhacks.

Beyond streaming, ohnePixel also crossed into team ownership and Major qualifiers. In a 2024 HLTV interview about his surprise DRILLAS project, he explained his motivation:

He said he “wanted to support some guys who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to go to a Major,”

describing the decision to back an underdog lineup through the Asia RMR qualifiers.

That blend of content, competition and community narrative makes him a huge storyline again in 2025, even as big personalities like gAuLeS, fl0m and up-and-coming pro-streamers such as jL make the field much more crowded.

5. Skin of the Year – Community Art on CS2’s Biggest Stage

Skin of the Year is the newest Community Award, but arguably the most directly relevant to CS2’s in-game economy.

How the list was built:

HLTV started from all 41 community-made skins added to CS2 in 2025.

An internal HLTV vote then cut that list down to a top 10.

Nominees (alphabetical):

AWP | Ice Coaled (REINCARNATION)

AWP | Printstream (JTPNZ)

FAMAS | Bad Trip (HEWOK)

Glock-18 | Shinobu (Horameow)

M4A1-S | Liquidation (Mei)

M4A4 | Full Throttle (dwern)

MAC-10 | Cat Fight (Maloo)

MAC-10 | Derailment (Tolik_Wask)

MP7 | Smoking Kills (48)

UMP-45 | Late Night Transit (cimota)

Why this category matters (especially for skin traders)

The Skin of the Year award was first introduced for the 2024 HLTV Awards, where AK-47 | Inheritance by Endrit took the trophy after being chosen as the standout among all skins added that year.

For traders and collectors, HLTV’s pick can dramatically increase a skin’s visibility. AK-47 | Inheritance coverage on esports and skin-trading sites framed it as one of the most desirable 2024 releases, with its “porcelain” look repeatedly highlighted in recap articles.

Now, with two AWP candidates, two MAC-10s, and a mix of rifles and SMGs, 2025’s list gives voters a chance to choose between:

classic clean designs (like the Printstream line),

loud, thematic graphics (Bad Trip, Cat Fight), and

more experimental styles (Smoking Kills, Late Night Transit).

Even beyond the award itself, these nominations tend to set the tone for which 2025 workshop artists get more long-term recognition – and which skins build momentum on the market.

Where the Community Awards sit in the bigger HLTV Awards picture

The Community Awards are one pillar of the broader HLTV Awards 2025 ecosystem:

The official awards site confirms that the main ceremony runs on January 10, 2026 at Sava Centar in Belgrade, with a mix of panel awards, role-based awards, women’s awards, and the Community Awards all on the same stage.

HLTV’s season-long coverage – including “Who is leading the race for the HLTV Awards?” and multiple HLTV Confirmed episodes – has been teasing frontrunners for Player of the Year, Team of the Year and Rookie of the Year throughout 2025.

2024’s show in Belgrade saw donk explode into superstardom with four trophies (Player, Rookie, Opener and Highlight of the Year), while NAVI were named Team of the Year and Imperial Valkyries took the women’s team award.

On top of that, HLTV added the Hall of Fame initiative, with a 2025 slate that includes legends such as cogu and markeloff, and a surprise Hall-of-Famers welcome for olofmeister teased in the Awards 2025 event hub.

Final thoughts

The 2025 HLTV Community Awards are more than just side trophies – they’re a snapshot of what the Counter-Strike audience actually values:

Which voices define the broadcast experience.

Which events felt like true milestones.

Which creators and streamers kept people engaged between LANs.

And which skins genuinely stood out in CS2’s rapidly evolving aesthetic.

If you’re planning content, prediction pieces, or market analysis around these categories, the safest way to stay grounded is to treat HLTV’s methodology and last year’s results as your baseline – and then watch how the community vote reshapes the meta on January 10.