Prior to the recent surge in viewership for Grand Theft Auto V due to high-profile influencers dipping their toes in the waters of role play streaming, “Vader” was a little-known broadcaster who specialized in role play.
Around the second week of March, a few top streamers like Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar, Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris and Saqib “Lirik” Zahid began streaming GTA role play on the NoPixel RP server with great success.
Lazar, who has been one of the most-watched streamers so far this year, took his viewership figures to new heights by playing GTA, and with 247 hours streamed, he’s racked up 11.3M hours watched averaging 44K CCV.
Morris has seen similar success pushing an average of 41K CCV over 123 hours of airtime for 4.9M hours watched, and Zahid has recorded 4.4M hours watched with an average of 44K CCV.
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However, as the characters of well-known influencers have stepped into the fictional world of drugs, gangs, and illicit activity, they’ve oftentimes crossed paths with a crotchety old manipulative criminal named Eugene.
The character, played by none other than the dedicated role play streamer Vader, is by no means a perfect person. In fact, he’s quite the opposite, but it is his imperfection that allows Vader to make him entertaining to be around and interact within the world of GTA.
Because of Vader’s ability to improvise with other streamers in creative ways, he’s been able to attract the likes of Morris and others to cooperate with his character in game, and generate content that’s brought attention to not only high profile streamers, but himself as well.
The results have been lucrative for both Vader’s viewership numbers, GTA viewership on the whole and his subscriber numbers – which recently surpassed 10,000.
Since the beginning of March, GTA viewership has skyrocketed toward the top echelon of Twitch content. In the past seven days, the title has recorded 19.4M hours watched and only been outdone by League of Legends (20.5M), and Vader has been one of the game’s top contributors.
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From March 12 onward, Vader has boosted his viewership to an average of 14K CCV over 213 hours of exclusively playing GTA. His 2.8M hours watched over that time period dwarfs the entire first two months of the year for him. Throughout the months of January and February, Vader’s 417 hours of GTA play averaged just 608 CCV.
With help from the exposure he’s been given on the channels of high-profile streamers who are known to hop from game to game, Vader has managed to quickly multiply his following and viewership using the cooperative nature of GTA’s role play servers.
While some streaming personalities, like Morris and Lazar, are big enough that their viewership base will follow them across multiple platforms, other smaller streamers must use their gaming skills, or in this case improv skills, to lure in viewers. For Vader, the move of big-time broadcasters to GTA served as a chance for him to shine and grow his channel.
