Twitch Just Had Its Best Month in Over a Year. It's Still Losing Grand Theft Auto to Kick.

Aug 8, 2026 · ShinyPull Team

A genuinely good month for Twitch

July was actually a strong month for Twitch. Total Hours Watched crossed 1.47 billion, up 6% from June. Average concurrent viewership climbed back above two million. The platform's monthly peak hit 4.6 million viewers, its highest point of the year, driven almost entirely by one broadcast: Ibai Llanos's La Velada del Año VI, a creator boxing event that became Twitch's single biggest stream of 2026. Ibai sits at over 20 million Twitch followers right now, comfortably the platform's most followed channel.

So on paper, Twitch is fine. Better than fine. But one of the platform's oldest bread and butter categories tells a different story, and it's been telling it for a while.

The category that's quietly leaving

Thirteen years after release, GTA V is still one of Twitch's biggest categories by total volume. But its monthly numbers have been sliding hard. July's 49.5 million hours watched was down from 67.9 million a year earlier, and average viewers fell from roughly 95K to 69K over the same stretch. Kick moved the opposite direction. It first passed Twitch in GTA V hours watched back in summer 2025 and has widened the gap every month since.

We wanted to see if that split shows up in our own tracked creators, not just the industry-wide numbers, so we checked the last 45 days of watch time for every GTA V streamer we track on both platforms.

It shows up. We track 42 creators who streamed GTA V on Twitch in that window, combining for 1,771,397 hours watched. We track 17 who streamed it on Kick, less than half as many creators, and they combined for 5,652,089 hours watched, more than three times Twitch's total. Kick's single most watched GTA V streamer in our data, 3mr, logged 2,898,393 hours watched on his own. That's more than our top 5 tracked Twitch GTA V streamers put together.

Why this matters right now

None of this is really about creators leaving Twitch. Most of Kick's biggest GTA V channels never streamed the game on Twitch at all, their audiences grew there directly. It's more that a specific category, one Rockstar built an entire modding and roleplay economy around over a decade, has settled into a new home just as Grand Theft Auto VI's release gets closer. Whichever platform GTA VI's biggest streamers pick to launch on is going to matter a lot more than it would have a year ago.

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