The MENA region is one of the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world. With a youth population that skews heavily under 35 and governments like Saudi Arabia pumping billions into gaming infrastructure under Vision 2030, the conditions for a live-streaming boom have been building for years; and now that boom is very much underway.
With gaming taking off, gaming-adjacent industries like live streaming are flourishing as well, extending the reach of popular games and events to audiences across the region. In this article, we break down the state of live streaming in MENA across Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Kick in Q1 2026, exploring platform growth, top creators, most watched games, and the events pulling in the biggest crowds.
As the definition of MENA can be quite flexible, here’s exactly how we’ve defined the region for this analysis:
- Languages: Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Turkish, Hebrew, Berber (Tamazight), Kurdish
- Countries: Bahrain, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet:
- Kick has become the platform of choice for Arabic and Turkish-speaking audiences, with 81.4% of all viewership in Q1 2026
- A large contingent of viewers from Türkiye, however, turn to YouTube specifically, with 12X more hours than the next most engaged country, Israel
- GTA V’s role-playing servers and Shooter games are the most popular content among MENA audiences
Kick Dominates MENA With 81% of All Live-Streaming Viewership
MENA’s live-streaming audience has grown dramatically over the past four years, with total quarterly hours watched climbing from around 95M in Q1 2022 to 490M in Q1 2026, a more than 5x increase. For most of that period, Twitch was the region’s default home for live-streaming, peaking at around 120M quarterly hours watched in early 2023. Then Kick arrived: Starting from near zero in Q3 2023, Kick grew explosively through 2024 and into 2025, overtaking Twitch as early as Q2 2024. By Q1 2026, Kick commands 81.4% of all MENA live-streaming viewership.
The reason? The Turkish government restricted access to Twitch in February 2024 over gambling content concerns, and Türkiye’s large and active streaming community needed somewhere to go. Kick, which had struck a compromise with Turkish authorities by limiting gambling sections, was the obvious destination. The timing lines up almost exactly with Twitch’s steepest decline: From around 107M quarterly hours watched in Q1 2024 down to just 26M by Q1 2026 (a drop of roughly 75%). YouTube Gaming, meanwhile, has played a quieter but consistent role, growing from around 24M quarterly hours in 2022 to 65M in Q1 2026.
YouTube Relies on Turkish Audiences, While Arabic Speakers Use Kick and Twitch
Before diving into the regional breakdown, it’s worth explaining how we’ve cut the data. On YouTube Gaming, we measure viewership by country. For Twitch and Kick, we measure by language instead. Both lenses tell us something different and useful about who is watching what, and where.
On YouTube Gaming, Türkiye accounts for 72.7% of all MENA hours watched on the platform, an outsized share that reflects both YouTube’s existing popularity in the country and the fact that many Turkish viewers turned to it as a Twitch alternative after the 2024 ban. The remaining YouTube viewership is spread thinly across the region, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE each contributing around 5-6%.
On Twitch and Kick combined, the picture flips. Arabic speakers account for 65.8% of the 425.6M hours watched total on those platforms, with Turkish-language viewers contributing a still-significant 34.7%. That Turkish speakers represent over a third of Twitch and Kick viewership across the entire MENA region underlines just how central Türkiye is to the regional live-streaming story.
Absi and Maherco Lead a Kick-Dominated Creator Landscape
The top 10 MENA creators by hours watched in Q1 2026 are almost exclusively on Kick, reinforcing the platform dominance we saw earlier. Leading the pack by a significant margin is Absi with 34.3M hours watched, followed by Maherco with 25.4M. Together they account for more hours watched than the remaining eight creators combined, and both are on Kick. Their content is quite different though: Absi built his audience on PUBG Mobile and EA Sports FC, while Maherco draws his from gambling content (Slots & Casino) and Rocket League, showing that Kick’s appeal in the region cuts across very different corners of gaming (more on that in a sec).
After Absi and Maherco, there’s a steep drop to 3rd place Drb7h at 8.8M, with positions 3-10 ranging down to 2.6M. The breadth of the top 10 is notable: The mix of Arabic and Turkish creator names reflects the language split we saw earlier, with Turkish streamers like Eray and Rammus53 sitting alongside Arabic-speaking creators like Absi, Drb7h, and SXB. YZNSA, a professional Counter-Strike player turned streamer, represents another dimension of the region’s creator landscape entirely, proving that MENA’s top tier isn’t built on one type of content or one community.
GTA V and Shooters Dominate MENA’s Most Watched Games
The top games and categories differ significantly among MENA audiences compared to the general streaming landscape: Though popular games are still featured here, the shift in ranks comes down mainly to the popularity of Absi and Maherco’s content.
Just Chatting leads all categories with 28.9M hours watched in Q1 2026 – common for live-streaming audiences. But among actual games, PUBG Mobile tops the charts at 10.3M hours, with GTA V close behind at 9.0M. GTA V‘s real footprint is actually significantly larger: Respect RP, a dedicated Arabic-language roleplay server running since 2020, adds another 8.3M hours to that total. Combined, GTA V and its RP server account for 17.3M hours watched, making it comfortably the most consumed game in the region when counted together. With GTA VI on the horizon, that makes the launch hugely anticipated in MENA.
The broader genre picture sees Shooters and Sports games ruling over MOBAs, with Counter-Strike 2 at 7.8M, EA Sports FC 26 at 7.5M, and Rocket League at 6.2M all sitting above League of Legends at 6.0M. The PUBG franchise deserves a special mention, with PUBG Mobile and PUBG: Battlegrounds combining for nearly 15M hours watched across mobile and PC. ARC Raiders also makes an appearance at 5.8M hours, a strong result for a newer title and a sign that MENA audiences are willing to embrace fresh releases alongside established favourites.
Fun fact: MENA-developed games don’t yet make up a significant share of global live-streaming viewership, but Growtopia from Ubisoft Abu Dhabi stands out as the most watched game published out of the region worldwide, generating 104K hours watched in Q1 2026.
Kings World Cup Nations Tops MENA Events, With CS2 Leading the Esports Pack
The most watched live-streaming event among MENA audiences in Q1 2026 was the Kings World Cup Nations 2026, the streamer-driven seven-a-side football competition co-founded by Gerard Piqué and Ibai Llanos, which peaked at 264K concurrent viewers (nearly 3X the next event on the list). Football culture runs deep across MENA, and with Morocco and Saudi Arabia both fielding national teams in the tournament, audiences had direct stakes in the competition. Kings League’s format, blending competitive sport with creator culture, proved a natural fit for a region already deeply invested in both.
Esports fill out the rest of the top events: Counter-Strike 2 is the standout esports title for MENA audiences, appearing three times across PGL Cluj-Napoca (88K), IEM Kraków (85K), and BLAST Open Rotterdam (74K), consistent with the strong CS2 presence we saw in the top creators. VALORANT also pulls double duty here with VCT 2026 EMEA Kickoff at 80K and VALORANT Masters 1 at 77K, while Dota 2 had a surprisingly strong showing with DreamLeague 28 coming in 2nd at 94K. Outside Kings World Cup Nations, all eight events sit within a tight 74K-94K band, pointing to a genuinely broad esports appetite in MENA rather than one title dominating everything else.
Although it falls outside Q1 2026, we’d be remiss not to mention one of the biggest events on the MENA live-streaming calendar: The Esports World Cup. Held annually in Riyadh, it has grown into one of the largest esports festivals in the world. We cover the tournament’s streaming performance in full in our dedicated article on the Esports World Cup.
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MENA’s live-streaming market has a character all of its own. Kick’s 81% share of regional viewership is unlike anything seen in other parts of the world, shaped in large part by Türkiye’s migration away from Twitch. Arabic-speaking audiences have built a thriving creator ecosystem on Kick, anchored by personalities like Absi and Maherco whose hours watched figures rival streamers anywhere on the planet. Games like PUBG Mobile, GTA V, and CS2 dominate watch time, while Kings World Cup Nations proves that football and creator culture are as powerful a combination in MENA as anywhere else.
The region is still in an early growth phase, though. With Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 investments continuing to mature, a young and digitally native population expanding its online habits, and GTA VI on the horizon, MENA’s live-streaming audience is only going to grow. For game publishers and brands looking to reach an engaged, fast-growing audience, the data makes a compelling case for putting MENA at the centre of their streaming strategy.
Interested in other regional analyses? We also covered The State of Japanese Streaming in full here.
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