Credit: Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar/Twitch
Rockstar Games’ 
Grand Theft Auto V may have come out in September of 2013, but the action-adventure video game has had a revival in the past week due to a player-vs-player role-play server that has attracted many of Twitch’s most high-profile personalities.
The premise is simple. Players are allowed to play on the server given the stipulation that they communicate and act in accordance with a character that they make up in the GTA universe. Streamers can play the role of an average citizen, a police officer, or a gang member, among other options.
The particular server that most streamers have been playing on is called “No Pixel,” and in order to play, there is an application process. As a part of the rules of the server, there are very strict regulations for staying in character, and helping to create an environment that is a mixture between a hilarious, yet poorly written sitcom, and an amateur improv show.
Following the lead of Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar and Saqib “Lirik” Zahid, numerous top streamers have turned this GTA modification into a bit of a Twitch sensation that has reeled in 18.9M hours watched in the last seven days, second only to League of Legends on the list of top content.
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Top influencers playing the title in the past week include Lazar who racked up 2.5M hours, Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris (2.2M hours watched), and Zahid (2.2M). However, the GTA popularity runs deeper than that. While those three have exclusively streamed the game to top-10 caliber viewership, many others have dabbled in the game to achieve their own success.
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Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar has averaged 34K concurrent viewers from streaming the game for 13.67 hours, and former Overwatch League player Félix “xQc” Lengyel hit nearly half a million hours watched (469K) off of 28 hours of airtime. Meanwhile, Sebastian “Forsen” Fors has taken a more volume-type approach to the game hitting 1.1M hours watched across 51.93 hours of airtime.
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On Top of The Summit
Earlier this year, Lazar started a similar movement in a different game, Sea of Thieves, after being tired of the Fortnite trend on Twitch from 2018. Following his success streaming the game in December of last year, other influencers took time out from playing games like Fortnite to sail the high seas online, but the trend quickly died out.
During December, when Lazar began playing the pirate-based action game, he averaged just 18K CCV on the title, but toward the end of the month, his sessions were pushing into the 30K CCV average range.
This year, Lazar has averaged 31K CCV playing Sea of Thieves, but now, as the top streamer playing 108 hours of GTA on a roleplay server he has averaged 38K CCV to the tune of 4.6M hours watched.
Take a Chance on Me
It’s no wonder why many people have flocked to Morris’ stream to watch his GTA role play sessions. The character that he plays in the videogame is very similar in personality to the streamer in real life. The only difference being that this in-game character finds himself getting roped into significantly more dramatic antics than the real-life streamer.
This year, Morris’ most watched content is “Just Chatting” which has averaged 18K CCV, but he is largely known for the variety of games that he plays. Since the beginning of January, he has streamed seven different titles for 15 hours or more with all but one averaging more than 20K CCV.
Don’t get it confused though. Morris has seen significantly heightened success on GTA. His average 47K CCV across 56.77 hours of airtime has given him 2.6M hours watched overall on the game.
It’s often difficult to determine if it’s the influencers that make a game break out or if it’s the demand for the game that results in it giving streamers a boost in viewership, but in situations like these, it doesn’t have to be a decisively “chicken or the egg” type of discussion.
Without GTA streamers like Morris and Lazar would obviously still be massively successful, but maybe the wouldn’t be having the same level of viewership. In the same vein, GTA, and these roleplay servers, have been around for a while, but it wasn’t until now that the game reached this height on Twitch.
