It looks like Grand Theft Auto V will always be relevant for players and viewers on Twitch. And that’s all thanks to its online mode, and especially RP-servers where Twitch streamers actively make content. The game is now ranked second among most popular categories; recently it also updated the record by peak viewers. And it’s all connected to the new content of the NoPixel server.
What’s GTA RP all about?
Roleplaying appeared in the Grand Theft Auto series long before GTA V. Players started gathering online on specially modified RP-servers back in SAMP. The mode has attracted both ordinary players and content creators. Videos with roleplaying gameplay have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
The popularity of RP servers in San Andreas ultimately declined, but they are back in trend in GTA V. One of the classic servers in the English-speaking community is NoPixel, which core crew got to Grand Theft Auto from ArmA. The server is famous for well-developed scripts that diversify gameplay. NoPixel received the 3.0 update on February 5th and many popular streamers got back to the game.
GTA V RP community only consists of PC users: simply because the FiveM framework is not available on consoles. This tool allows you to play on custom servers with mods and addons. NoPixel differs from other servers as it has a more elaborate game world.
NoPixel is one of the most popular servers, but it’s not the only one. There are also quite popular Eclipse and MafiaCity servers. But they differ nonetheless: for example, MafiaCityworks works on Rage instead of FiveM, which is why NPCs are not an important part of the gameplay.
Viewers like drama
Since February 5 viewers of Twitch got to know the diverse universe of characters of the NoPixel world. Some of the inhabitants of the server have their own detailed biographies on fandom.com (some historical characters might be jealous of it).
The variety of heroes is truly impressive, with Johnny Silverhand, insane Jean Paul, calm Sven Snusberg, and cocky Umberto Antonio Donato Pecorino. Streamers act out in different ways and have to communicate with each other, and viewers are actively following this.
Sebastian Forsen Fors' character Sven Snusberg has a detailed biography: fans have described every day of his life, including the funniest quotes and the chronology of crimes. XQc, HasanAbi and dozens of other content makers have similar pages.
Not all the streamers follow community guidelines. Two Twitch partners received bans on NoPixel over the past few days. Greekgodx was temporarily banned, and SlikeR got a permanent ban. The reason was the harassment of female characters in the NoPixel game world. The owner of the server stated that this is low-grade and stupid content that does not belong to an RP server.
SlikeR was called out by other gaming influencers. But it should be noted that dramas always accompany RP servers in games. In December-January, streamers were actively playing on the Rust server by OfflineTV, and back then xQc was the troublemaker.
New Peak Viewers record seven years after release
GTA V was released in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360. Two years later the PC version was released, and the game still remains incredibly popular to this day. A week ago GTA V set its new record on Twitch with 438,085 Peak Viewers. The last time the game was so popular on the platform during summer 2020, back then it had around 300K Peak Viewers on average.
During the first week after NoPixel 3.0 release the game collected 36.4M Hours Watched, which is twice as much as in the last week of January. Similarly, the Average Viewers parameter has doubled (from 107.8K to 218.9K people), and the peak number of simultaneously streaming channels exceeded 6K.
The average number of viewers in the category has been around 210-220K people for the last couple of days. Every day the audience spends a total of 5-5.3 million hours watching broadcasts of the game.
English has been the most popular language 10 days after the release of NoPixel 3.0 with 58.7% of the total Hours Watched. This is twice as much as in January: not surprising, since everyone on NoPixel speaks English.
Portuguese language was the second most popular one, but its share in total Hours Watched decreased from 19.5% to 13.4%. Similarly to English, Spanish, German and French also lost its cut, their share ranged from 4 to 7.1%.
Auronplay has been the leader of GTA V by Peak Viewers in February: over 163.2K people simultaneously watched its GTA RP stream on February 7. The member of the Brazilian association LOUD under the pseudonym Coringa was the leader by Hours Watched (3.6M).
However, both streamers played on their local servers. Yet the whole category was mainly boosted by NoPixel and its English-speaking content makers. The leader was xQc with 3.4M Hours Watched and 71,K Average Viewers.
Top streamers of NoPixel 3.0 by Hours Watched include sodapoppin, HasanAbi, LIRIK, forsen and summit1g: the latter has regularly streamed the game over the past year.
January’s top had streamers with less than 700K Hours Watched. In February, the minimum is 1M+ Hours Watched. Compared to last month, a lot of streamers dropped out of the top: only loud_coringa didn’t leave the top 10 after the NoPixel 3.0 release.
2021 kicked off on Twitch with the dominance of RP in online games. Most popular English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking streamers pushed games higher in Twitch Category rankings.
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