November

• 2 November: Sahar RP anniversary night. Online. The GTA roleplay server's whole cast, one festival, dozens of perspectives.
• 14–16 November: Himalayan Valorant Invitational. Online groups, LAN final in Kathmandu. Our full format guide has the details.
• 22 November: Pokhara Creator Meetup. Talks on gear, sponsorship and burnout, then a lakeside meet-and-greet. Free, registration required.

December

• 5–7 December: PUBG Mobile Community Cup (Winter). Open registration for amateur squads, with a streamed final.
• 12 December: Streaming Basics Workshop, Dharan. Hands-on OBS and mobile-streaming session for first-timers aged 16+.
• 30 December: Year in Review live. Our own end-of-year stream with guests.

Organising something? Send dates and details to our tips desk and we'll consider it for the calendar.

Format

• 16 teams: 12 from open qualifiers, 4 invited
• Double elimination, best-of-three throughout
• Grand final best-of-five on day three
• Prize pool: NPR 15,00,000, with the winner taking 50%

Teams to watch

The invited sides include last year's champions and three organisations that have spent the year scrimming against regional teams in India and Bangladesh. Of the qualifiers, watch for squads with university backing. Two of them have their own bootcamp houses for the first time this season.

Broadcast

The main broadcast runs in Nepali, led by Kathmandu Caster, with an English co-stream. PixelPragya joins the analyst desk for the playoff days.

Group-stage matches are online; only the final day is played on LAN. The organiser has said free tickets will be released in batches, so follow our events page for the dates.

Why it matters

A healthy invitational gives Nepali teams something they've lacked: regular, high-pressure matches against each other on a broadcast large enough to attract sponsors. If the LAN draws a crowd, expect more organisers to follow.

The 40-momo challenge

Momo Mode agreed to eat forty momos in twenty minutes if chat hit a donation goal for a children's hospital. Chat hit it in eleven minutes. The streamer did not hit forty. The final seconds, a long and silent stare at momo number 31, have been remixed into everything from cricket highlights to a wedding reel.

The charity got its money either way.

Yak traffic jam

At 3,800 metres, DipzIRL asked chat to vote: wait for a herd of yaks to clear the trail or scramble around them. Chat voted to wait. The yaks took forty minutes. The 33-second cut has done better than anything else from his trek.

1v5 on a UPS beep

PixelPragya lost power mid-round, switched to backup and won a 1v5 with her inverter beeping in the background. She swears the beeping helped her concentrate.

Have a clip we should see? Email the tips desk; details are on our contact page.

He did not stop the match. "We finish this one first," he told a chat that was moving too fast to read. "Then we celebrate properly."

From a borrowed phone to seven figures

Shrestha started streaming in 2019 from a shared hostel room in Baneshwor, on a phone borrowed from a cousin. For the first year, he says, a good night meant twenty viewers. What changed was not a viral clip but a habit: a weekly custom-room night where anyone subscribed could join a lobby and play against him.

"People don't come back for the gameplay. They come back because last week they were in the stream."

That format still anchors the channel. Thursday customs regularly fill four full lobbies, and long-time viewers moderate them.

The fan meet

A week later, roughly two thousand people turned up to a free meet-and-greet in Kathmandu. There were no paid tickets and no VIP line. It was a deliberate choice, Shrestha said, after hearing from younger fans priced out of earlier creator events.

Casting duties for the on-stage showmatch went to Kathmandu Caster, who joked that it was the first time he had commentated a game where the audience knew every player's real name.

What comes next

Shrestha says the money from the milestone month will go into a second PC for a dedicated editor and into the PUBG Mobile Community Cup, an open amateur tournament his community is running in December.

This story was updated on 21 October with attendance figures from the organisers.

Explaining, not showing off

The series works because she slows down. Every game is annotated in Nepali and English, mistakes are left in, and viewers are asked to predict the next move before she plays it.

A real-world spillover

Several school and college clubs in Kathmandu now run viewing sessions, and local over-the-board tournaments report more first-time entrants this year. Tsering is careful not to take credit for that, but she's happy to host the clubs' players in her online arenas.

What's next

A second series aimed at players already around 1200, and a monthly "ask a coach" stream with titled players as guests.

Bhai Dai is played by Momo Mode, one of around forty streamers who broadcast from the server each night. Viewers don't just watch one channel. They hop between perspectives to see both sides of the same argument.

Rules that make the story work

Sahar RP's whitelist application asks for a character backstory, not a gaming résumé. New players shadow an existing character for their first week. Breaking character to talk about the real world is discouraged on-air, and violent storylines need sign-off from the server's small story team.

The result is slower than most GTA content (there can be an hour of conversation between car chases), but it has built something rare: an audience that comes back for people.

A serial, not a highlight reel

Fans run recap channels that summarise each night's events, complete with family trees and timelines. The server's courtroom scenes, improvised from start to finish, have become a genre of their own.

"It's a teledrama where the actors don't know the script," Momo Mode told us between sessions. "Neither do we, honestly."

The anniversary night

Sahar RP turns two on 2 November, with a scripted city festival and every regular character online at once. Expect forty-plus simultaneous perspectives, and at least one courtroom drama.

The veterans

NimbuGG has been streaming Dota 2 since 2016. His five-stack, average age 29, came in with a reputation and a lot of jokes about their knees. They backed it up, reaching the grand final without dropping a series.

The new school

Their opponents were a team of four school students and a university fresher who learned the game almost entirely from YouTube guides and NimbuGG's own beginners' Discord. They play faster, take more fights and draft heroes the veterans call "unserious".

The final went the full three games. The new school won it.

A scene with a pipeline

"That's the point," NimbuGG said afterwards, laughing. "If the old guys keep winning, there's no scene. There's just us getting older."

Organisers say they'll run a second LAN in spring and are looking for a larger venue.

The income stack

Platform revenue. Ad share and channel memberships are the most predictable income, but they depend heavily on where viewers are. A large Nepali audience can earn less per view than a smaller international one.

Live donations. Super Chats, Stars and direct tips spike during events, charity streams, milestones, big tournaments, and drop on ordinary nights.

Brand deals. For the creators we spoke to, sponsorships were often the largest single line. Mobile phones, energy drinks, internet providers and gaming peripherals dominate.

Events and appearances. Casting, hosting and paid appearances at college fests and launches.

The costs nobody posts

• Backup power: inverters and batteries are a standard expense
• Redundant internet lines
• Editors and thumbnail designers
• Tax and accounting advice, which several creators said they wished they'd sought earlier

Getting paid

Receiving international payouts from Nepal can be slower and more complicated than in neighbouring countries, and the options change often. Several creators told us they rely on a bank that specialises in foreign-currency accounts for freelancers. Check current rules with your bank and a tax adviser before you rely on any one route.

The takeaway

The creators with the steadiest incomes didn't depend on any single source. Their advice to newcomers: treat sponsorships as a business relationship, keep records from day one and don't quit a job until the channel has paid the rent for six months in a row.

The project

The plan is all three of Kathmandu Valley's Durbar Squares: Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur, her home town, came first. Patan took the longest, mostly because of the carved roof struts, which she rebuilt three times.

Getting it right

Two architecture students volunteer as accuracy checkers. They work from photographs and published floor plans, and they flag mistakes in chat with what Riya calls "terrifying politeness".

In the classroom

Teachers at several schools now use the world file to give virtual tours, and Riya has released a version with information signs in Nepali and English. She doesn't charge for it.

Next: Kathmandu

Hanuman Dhoka is next, and she says it's the most complex of the three. Her estimate is another four hundred hours, which chat has already decided is optimistic.

How it worked

Every donation was read aloud. Milestones unlocked challenges: pistol-only rounds, a match played with the screen upside down, an hour of singing between games. Guest players joined from Biratnagar, Itahari and Kathmandu.

All funds went directly to a registered relief organisation, which published its own receipt during the stream. Dhunge said he took no share and that the platform's cut on donations would be covered from his own sponsorship income.

The scene shows up

Viewer numbers stayed high through the small hours, helped by other streamers raiding in. By the final hour, chat had settled into a single repeated message: the amount still needed to reach the goal.

They reached it with nine minutes left.

Next year

Dhunge says next year's marathon will add a second location in Dharan so viewers can donate supplies in person.

The backpack

The rig is a small encoder, four SIM cards across two networks, a power bank the size of a brick and a lot of cable ties. When one signal drops, the others pick up the slack. He built it himself after buying parts piece by piece over a year.

Guides first

Every trip is done with a licensed local guide, who is credited on stream and paid from the trip's sponsorship. Upper Mustang requires a restricted-area permit, and Dipz says that planning took longer than the gear.

Chat as travel companion

Viewers voted on lunch stops, suggested questions for villagers (with the guide translating and politely declining a few) and spent forty minutes watching a herd of yaks decide whether to cross a path. That clip alone travelled further than the rest of the trek combined.

Not a template

Dipz is clear that the trek is not something to copy casually. Altitude, weather and permits are serious, and he says the stream is always second to safety.

You hit Radiant on battery power. How?

The inverter was beeping the whole game. Chat was more stressed than I was. I'd tested the backup the week before, so I knew I had about forty minutes. The match took thirty-one.

Why stream from Pokhara rather than Kathmandu?

Family, mostly. And honestly the fibre here has been fine for two years. The bigger problem is latency to the game servers, which is the same anywhere in Nepal. You learn to play around it.

Your "Fix My Aim" segment reviews viewers' own clips. Why give that away?

Because nobody did it for me. When I started, the coaching content was all in English and all for people on 20 ms ping. If I can explain crosshair placement in Nepali to someone in Butwal, that's worth more than a sub.

What's still hard?

Comments. Most of chat is great. A small part of it is not, and that part is louder when you're a woman. I have good moderators and I use them.

What's next?

The analyst desk at the Himalayan Valorant Invitational, and a small coaching programme for women's teams. Ask me in a year whether it worked.

1. Start with what you have

Phone streaming works well for mobile games and IRL. YouTube and Facebook both let you stream from your phone, though YouTube may require a minimum number of subscribers before you can go live from mobile, check the current rules.

PC streaming with OBS Studio (free) gives you overlays, scenes and better quality, and is the standard for PC games.

2. Internet: upload is what counts

Streaming uses your upload speed. For a stable 720p stream, aim for a consistent 5 Mbps upload; for 1080p, more. Run a speed test at the time of day you plan to stream, not at noon. A wired connection beats Wi-Fi every time.

3. Plan for power cuts

A small inverter or UPS that keeps your router and device running for 30–60 minutes will save more streams than any other upgrade.

4. Sound before picture

Viewers forgive a soft camera. They leave over bad audio. A basic USB or clip-on mic is the best first purchase.

5. Pick one platform, then expand

Choose where your audience already is. Many Nepali mobile-gaming viewers are on YouTube and Facebook; PC communities lean towards YouTube and Twitch. Multistreaming can come later.

6. Do the boring admin early

• Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere
• Use a separate email for your channel
• Keep a simple record of income and sponsors
• Read our guide to streamer safety before you show your face or your street on camera

7. Be consistent

A fixed schedule, even just two nights a week, beats random marathon streams. Put it in your channel banner and stick to it.

Before you go live

• Check your background. Windows, street signs, school uniforms, packages with labels and distinctive views can all reveal where you live.
• Separate accounts. Use a channel email and phone number that aren't tied to your personal social media.
• Two-factor authentication on every account, using an app rather than SMS where possible.
• Delay IRL streams by a few minutes so viewers can't find you in real time.

Moderation

• Recruit two or three moderators you trust before you need them.
• Use the platform's blocked-word lists, including Romanised Nepali slurs and your own real name and address.
• Decide your rules in advance and pin them. It's easier to enforce rules that already exist.

If something goes wrong

1. Don't engage live. End the stream if you need to.
2. Document everything: screenshots with dates and usernames.
3. Report through the platform's tools.
4. Tell someone: family, a moderator, a friend.
5. For threats or doxxing, contact Nepal Police's Cyber Bureau, and keep your records ready.

Look after yourself

Taking a break after a bad stream is not weakness. Several of the streamers we spoke to have a rule: no reading comments for 24 hours after a raid.