Why is GTA RP so big in Poland?

Because Poland is the fourth-largest Grand Theft Auto audience in the world, it watches almost all of it on Kick, and at four in the morning UTC — when this site takes its daily census — not one Polish channel is live to see.

Take each of the 65 languages we publish a board for. Take that language’s ten biggest GTA channels. Add up the hours their viewers spent watching them over the last thirty days. Polish comes fourth, on 3,679,302 hours: behind Arabic, English and Thai, ahead of Japanese, Portuguese, French and Spanish. A language with around 38 million speakers outranks one with several hundred million.

Ten channels per language is a blunt cut and a deliberate one. Every board we publish stops at fifty, so a language with two thousand GTA channels gets truncated far earlier in its own distribution than a language with sixty — English’s fiftieth-ranked channel still averages 4,281 viewers, Polish’s averages 758. Comparing full boards would flatter the small scenes. Ten is the same cut for everybody.

It is still worth showing where the answer changes. Widen it to fifty and Portuguese overtakes Polish; nothing else in the top four moves.

Language	Hours, top 10 channels	Hours, top 50 channels
Arabic	10,774,933	27,240,964
English	8,531,154	17,869,010
Thai	7,597,175	11,934,072
Polish	3,679,302	6,593,048
Japanese	2,875,261	6,059,235
Portuguese	2,826,471	7,373,774
French	2,534,467	4,735,306
Spanish	1,395,781	3,399,662

Hours watched is a rolling thirty-day figure held per creator; all 65 language boards were read at 04:17 UTC on 21 September 2026. Language is the tag the platform carries on the channel, not a nationality.

All fifty Polish channels together took 6,593,048 hours in thirty days. Against every hour of GTA watched anywhere on Kick, Twitch and YouTube in the same window — 198,650,382 viewer-hours, from 720 consecutive hourly readings — that is 3.3% of the entire category. Six of those channels sit in the global top hundred.

Who they actually are

#	Channel	Platform	Avg viewers	Hours watched, 30d	Hours live, 30d
1	xmerghani	Kick	15,220	1,140,300	74.9
2	rybsonlol	Kick	10,832	216,477	20.0
3	YoungMulti	Twitch	10,685	151,203	14.2
4	grendy	Kick	8,582	746,514	87.0
5	neexcsgo	Kick	8,285	941,631	113.7
6	EWROON	Twitch	7,920	413,320	52.2
7	forti97	Kick	5,557	32,792	5.9
8	sha3kerr	Kick	5,273	7,471	1.4
9	MrDzinold	Twitch	5,027	11,478	2.3
10	marchewapl	Kick	4,101	18,116	4.4

The ten largest Polish-tagged GTA channels by average concurrent viewers, read from our Polish board at 04:17 UTC on 21 September 2026. Averages are weighted by airtime, so a single enormous night does not outrank a month of work.

Look at the last column before the first. The channel at the top of Polish GTA was live for 74.9 hours in a month — two and a half hours a day — and averaged 15,220 people while it was. Four of the ten were live for under six hours in thirty days and still averaged over 4,000 concurrent viewers while they were. This is not a scene of marathon broadcasters grinding for discovery. It is appointment viewing: a handful of people who go live in the evening, and a country that turns up.

One platform, and largely one server

Of the fifty Polish channels, 37 are on Kick, and Kick carries 86% of all Polish GTA hours — 5,640,371 of 6,593,048, against 941,804 on Twitch and 10,873 on YouTube. Kick’s lead over Twitch in GTA is a global story by now, but nowhere we measure is it this lopsided.

And they are nearly all in the same place. Of the ten channels above, the most recent broadcast we have recorded for eight of them names a roleplay server or says GTA RP outright, and four of those name the same one: STREFA.RP, STREFARP, [SRP], [StrefaRP]. Strefa RP’s own Discord listing calls it “największy polski serwer GTA Roleplay” — the largest Polish GTA roleplay server — and showed 77,245 members when we checked it on 21 September 2026. That is the server’s description of itself, not a measurement of ours.

The two Twitch channels in the top three are somewhere else entirely. YoungMulti’s most-watched recent VOD is titled “GTA RP NOPIXEL: DZIEŃ 3” at 204,287 views, and EWROON’s is “NOPIXEL 5.0 ERWIN KNUCKLES DZIEN 10” — both on the invite-only server Rockstar backed when it opened on 8 September. The Polish scene has a domestic centre of gravity on Kick and an export wing on Twitch, and the two are playing on different servers.

Why you have never seen them

Because of when they stream, and when the rest of us look.

Across twelve complete censuses of every live GTA stream on Kick, Twitch and YouTube, taken between 04:02:16 and 04:18:25 UTC on 21 September 2026 — a mean of 191,212 concurrent viewers on 1,738 channels — the number of Polish channels live was zero. Not small. None.

That is six in the morning in Warsaw, which explains it completely. The ten channels above started their most recently recorded broadcasts between 09:55 and 19:21 UTC; in local time, between lunch and half past nine at night. A snapshot taken at 04:00 UTC cannot see a country that streams in the evening, and every census this site takes for a blog post is taken at 04:00 UTC.

We have published that mistake in the other direction before. Our language piece has a table showing Thai leading GTA viewing, which was true of the hour it was taken and not true of the day. The thirty-day boards exist precisely because one hour lies — and the thing an hour hides best is a scene in a time zone you are not awake for.

What happens to this audience on 19 November

Nothing, is the honest answer, and that is the interesting part.

Polish GTA is roleplay. Roleplay is FiveM. FiveM is a PC mod framework and always has been, and GTA VI ships on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S only on 19 November 2026. We fetched rockstargames.com/VI again this morning: seven mentions of “November 19”, twelve of “PlayStation 5”, five of “Xbox Series”, and zero of “PC” or “Windows”. So when the launch-week charts arrive and everyone reads them as GTA moving to VI, remember that several million hours a month of this category are attached to a server that cannot follow, played by people whose audience is not buying a PS5 to watch them stop.

The same logic runs through our own launch forecast: the half of GTA viewing that is roleplay stays where it is. Poland is a clean case of it, because it is almost entirely roleplay and almost entirely on one platform.

What this does not show

The language tag is the platform’s, attached to the channel, and it is not a nationality. It is a good proxy here — we read the most recent recorded broadcast title for each of the ten and all ten are plainly in Polish, several naming Polish servers — but a Polish-tagged channel is not the same thing as a viewer in Poland, and we cannot see where the audience sits.

The ranking is a fixed-N comparison, which is a choice. Ten channels per language is fair in the sense that every language gets the same cut, and unfair in the sense that English has thousands of channels below its tenth and Polish has forty. Read it as “how big are this language’s biggest channels”, not “how much does this language watch in total”.

Our content-type split for Polish reads 52% roleplay and 48% free-roam, and that free-roam number is not trustworthy. The classifier defaults anything it cannot match to free-roam, and it matches non-English titles 17% of the time against 39% for English. Treat 52% as a floor.

Session titles come from a rotating per-creator snapshot, so the “most recent recorded broadcast” for these ten was written anywhere between 7 August and 19 September. They are evidence of what a channel plays, not of what it played last night.

And we count viewers, not players. Nothing here says how many Poles play GTA, only how many watch it — and only on Kick, Twitch and YouTube.

Cite this

Every figure here is our own measurement. The language ranking is all 65 boards/lang/*.json boards read at 04:17 UTC on 21 September 2026, each a thirty-day rolling window; the category total is 720 consecutive hourly readings to 04:00 UTC on 21 September 2026; the live check is twelve complete censuses between 04:02:16 and 04:18:25 UTC on the same morning, each reconciling exactly to the published totals with no duplicate channels. Method, definitions and known gaps are at /methodology/, the live numbers are at /live/, the Polish board is at /language/pl/, and the permalink for this piece is https://luciastream.com/blog/why-is-gta-rp-so-big-in-poland/.

The fourth-largest GTA audience in the world is about ten channels on a whitelisted Polish server, streaming in the evening to a country of 38 million, and the English-language coverage of it amounts to a few auto-generated ranking pages. That seems like an oversight worth correcting.