Twitch Puts GTA V in Its Global Top Five and First in Japan Alone

Twitch published its State of Gaming report for 2026 on 9 September. Grand Theft Auto V is one of the five most-watched games on the platform, thirteen years after release. In exactly one country on earth it is the most-watched game of all, and that country is Japan. What was read CONFIRMED. This desk's editor fetched the report personally at 03:16 UTC on 23 September 2026. It answered HTTP 200 at 36,575 bytes decompressed. Everything below is read off that document and nothing is modelled or estimated except where this desk's own arithmetic is labelled as such. The headline numbers, verbatim Between January 1, 2026 and September 1, 2026, viewers have watched more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content on Twitch, the equivalent of one hour for every person on earth. Our five most-watched games generated a combined nearly 1.7 billion hours watched. The five, in the order the page itself lists them: League of Legends, Counter-Strike, GTA V, VALORANT, World of Warcraft. Divide the second figure by the first and you get 19.8 per cent. That division is this desk's own arithmetic; Twitch does not print the percentage. Roughly a fifth of all gaming hours watched on Twitch in eight months came from five categories, and the third-largest of those five is a game that shipped in 2013. Where GTA V places, region by region CONFIRMED. The report carries a top three games table broken out by region. This desk's editor transcribed the GTA V placements from the raw table rather than from anyone's summary of it. RegionGTA V placement in top three Japan1st France2nd United States3rd DACH3rd BLX3rd United Kingdomabsent Spainabsent Mexicoabsent Brazilabsent Taiwan & HKabsent Australia and New Zealandabsent CONFIRMED negative, and worth stating plainly because the opposite has circulated. GTA V does not appear anywhere in the top three for Taiwan & HK, nor for Australia and New Zealand. Japan is the only region in the table where it is first. For the record on how that table is labelled: the string "Hong Kong" appears 0 times on the page, and the region is written "Taiwan & HK". Twitch lists GTA V's top streamers as JLtomy, Fps_shaka and Penta. Fps_shaka is one of the largest Japanese-language broadcasters on the platform, which is consistent with where the category ranks first. The Drops numbers, which are the other story in the report CONFIRMED. Three figures, quoted as the report gives them: "Streams using the DropsEnabled tag generated 1.6 billion hours - up 46%" "more than 7,500 Drops campaigns, an increase of 20%" "users who participated and claimed Drops increased 15% to 40 million" Forty million people claimed a Drop. That is the backdrop against which the current GTA RP Week campaign is running, and it explains why a platform-level Drops event built around one roleplay server is worth a publisher's time at all. What Twitch's own executive said CONFIRMED. Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, quoted from the report: 8.6 billion hours of gaming content watched in just eight months - and the GTA VI community showing up so big it broke the site - are powerful testaments to the strength of Twitch's gaming community. That is a senior Twitch executive putting a GTA 6 traffic event into the company's own annual report, on the record, under his own name. Whatever weight anyone wants to put on the phrase "broke the site", it is Twitch's word and not a viewer's. What this actually establishes, and what it does not It establishes that the GTA audience on Twitch is still enormous, still concentrated, and geographically uneven in a way that will matter on 19 November 2026, 57 days from today by this desk's own arithmetic. GTA V's viewership on Twitch has for years been substantially a roleplay audience rather than a base-game audience, a pattern this desk has documented repeatedly, including in what Twitch's own chief executive has said about roleplay outlasting the sequel. What it does not establish is anything about GTA 6. These are 2026 numbers for a 2013 game. Nothing in the report forecasts sequel viewership, and this desk is not going to infer one from the other. The one hard GTA 6 datum in the whole document is Minton's sentence, and the site-breaking event it refers to is already on the record here in our coverage of the time-boxed GTA 6 category. One limit. Everything above is Twitch reporting on Twitch. There is no independent verification of an 8.6 billion hour figure, none is available, and none is claimed here. The numbers are the company's own, stated as the company's own.