The MENA region is one of the fastest growing gaming markets in the world. With the youth population skewing under 35 and governments like Saudi Arabia pouring billions of dollars into gaming infrastructure under Vision 2030, live streaming boom conditions have been present for years; and now the boom is underway.
With the development of gaming, gaming-related industries such as live streaming are also growing, expanding the reach of popular games and events to audiences across the region. In this article, we outline the state of live streaming in MENA on Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Kick in Q1 2026, exploring platform growth, top content creators, most-watched games, and most-watched events.
Since the definition of MENA is quite flexible, here’s how we defined the region for this analysis:
- Language: Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Turkish, Hebrew, Berber (Tamazight), Kurdish
- Country: Bahrain, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, 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 viewers in Q1 2026
- However, a large number of viewers from Türkiye turned to YouTube specifically, with 12X more viewing time than the next most engaged country, Israel.
- GTA V role-playing servers and Shooter games are the most popular content among MENA audiences
Kick Dominates MENA With 81% of All Live Stream Viewers
MENA live broadcast viewership has increased dramatically over the past four years, with total quarterly viewing hours increasing from approximately 95 million in the first quarter of 2022 to 490 million in the first quarter of 2026, or an increase of more than 5x. For much of that period, Twitch was the region’s default home for live streaming, peaking at around 120 million quarterly viewing hours in early 2023. Then Kick came along: Starting from near zero in Q3 2023, Kick grew explosively throughout 2024 and into 2025, overtaking Twitch in early Q2 2024. By Q1 2026, Kick controlled 81.4% of all live-streaming MENA viewing.
The reason? The Turkish government restricted access to Twitch in February 2024 due to gambling content concerns, and Turkey’s large and active streaming community needed a place to go. Kick, which has reached a compromise with the Turkish authorities by restricting gambling areas, is an obvious goal. The timing is almost the same as Twitch’s sharpest decline yet: From about 107 million quarterly viewing hours in Q1 2024 to just 26 million in Q1 2026 (down about 75%). Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming plays a quieter but consistent role, growing from around 24 million hours per quarter in 2022 to 65 million hours in the first quarter of 2026.
YouTube Relies on Turkish Viewers, While Arabic Speakers Use Kick and Twitch
Before diving into regional breakdowns, it’s worth explaining how we cut the data. At YouTube Gaming, we measure views by country. For Twitch and Kick, we measure by language. Both lenses tell us something different and useful about who is watching what, and where.
On YouTube Games, Türkiye accounted for 72.7% of all MENA hours watched on the platform, a huge number that reflects YouTube’s existing popularity in the country and the fact that many Turkish viewers turned to YouTube as an alternative to Twitch after the ban in 2024. The remaining YouTube views are spread thinly across the region, with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE accounting for around 5-6% each.
On Twitch and Kick combined, the picture is reversed. Arabic speakers accounted for 65.8% of the platform’s 425.6 million total viewing hours, with Turkish-speaking viewers accounting for a still significant 34.7%. Turkish speakers representing more than a third of Twitch and Kick viewers across the MENA region underscores how important a role Türkiye plays in the regional live streaming story.
Absi and Maherco Lead a Kick-Dominated Creator Landscape
The top 10 MENA content creators by hours watched in Q1 2026 almost exclusively used Kick, cementing the platform dominance we saw previously. Leading by a significant margin was Absi with 34.3 million hours watched, followed by Maherco with 25.4 million hours watched. Together, they generate more hours watched than the other eight content creators combined, and both are on Kick. But their content is very different: Absi is building its audience PUBG Mobile And EA Sports FCwhile Maherco takes his work from gambling content (Slots & Casinos) and Rocket Leagueshows that Kick’s appeal in the region spans a variety of different angles of the game (more on that in a moment).
After Absi and Maherco, there was a sharp decline to 3rd places Drb7h at 8.8M, with positions 3-10 ranging down to 2.6M. The breadth of the top 10 is noteworthy: The mix of Arabic and Turkish creators’ names reflects the language split we saw previously, with Turkish streamers like Eray and Rammus53 sitting alongside Arabic-language creators like Absi, Drb7h, and SXB. YZNSA, a professional Counter-attack players turned streamers, represent another dimension to the region’s creator landscape, proving that the top tier in MENA is not built on one type of content or one community.
GTA V and Shooters Dominate Most-Watched Games in MENA
Top games and categories differ significantly among MENA viewers compared to the streaming landscape in general: While popular games are still featured here, this ranking change is primarily due to the popularity of Absi and Maherco content.
Just Chatting led all categories with 28.9 million hours watched in Q1 2026 – typical for live streaming viewers. But between the actual games, PUBG Mobile topped the charts with 10.3 million hours, with GTA V close behind at 9.0M. GTA VThe real footprint is actually much larger: Respect RP, an Arabic-only roleplay server operating since 2020, added another 8.3 million hours to that total. Combined, GTA V and its RP server account has been watched for 17.3 million hours, making them the most consumed games in the region together. With GTA VI on the horizon, this makes its launch highly anticipated in MENA.
A broader overview of the genre sees Shooters and Sports games reigning supreme over MOBAs, with Counterattack 2 at 7.8 million, EA Sports FC 26 at 7.5M, and Rocket League at 6.2M all sit at the top League of Legends at 6.0M. The PUBG franchise deserves special attention, with PUBG Mobile And PUBG: Battlegrounds combined for nearly 15 million hours watched on mobile devices and PC. ARC raider also clocked in at 5.8 million hours, a strong result for a newer title and a sign that audiences in MENA are willing to accept new releases alongside existing favorites.
Interesting facts: However, games developed in MENA have not yet contributed significantly to global live streaming viewership Growtopia from Ubisoft Abu Dhabi stands out as the most-watched game worldwide, generating 104K hours watched in Q1 2026.
Kings World Cup Nations Tops MENA Event, With CS2 Leading Esports Pack
The most-watched live streaming event among MENA viewers in Q1 2026 was Kings World Cup Nations 2026, a streamer-driven seven-a-side football competition co-founded by Gerard Piqué and Ibai Llanos, which peaked at 264K concurrent viewers (almost 3X as many as the next event on the list). Football culture is widespread in MENA, and since Morocco and Saudi Arabia both fielded national teams in the tournament, spectators had a direct stake in the competition. The Kings League format, which combines competitive sports with creator culture, has proven to be a natural fit for a region already heavily invested in both.
Esports makes up the rest of the top events: Counterattack 2 is a standout esports title for MENA audiences, appearing three times at PGL Cluj-Napoca (88K), IEM Kraków (85K), and BLAST Open Rotterdam (74K), consistently strong CS2 the presence we see in top content creators. VALUE also doing double duty here with VCT 2026 EMEA Kickoff at 80K and VALORANT Masters 1 at 77K, while Dota 2 had a very strong showing with DreamLeague 28 coming in 2ndAnd at 94K. Outside of the Kings World Cup Nations, all eight events are in the tight 74K-94K range, showing the very broad appetite for esports in MENA rather than one event dominating everything.
While this is outside of Q1 2026, we would be remiss not to mention one of the biggest events on the MENA live streaming calendar: the Esports World Cup. Held annually in Riyadh, the festival has grown into one of the largest esports festivals in the world. We cover the tournament streaming performance in full in our special article about the Esports World Cup.
_
The MENA live streaming market has its own character. Kick’s 81% regional audience share is unlike anything seen in other parts of the world, shaped in large part by Turkey’s migration from Twitch. Arabic-speaking audiences have built a thriving creator ecosystem on Kick, supported by figures like Absi and Maherco whose hours of viewing figures rival those of streamers anywhere in the world. Games like PUBG Mobile, GTA VAnd CS2 dominated watch time, while the Kings World Cup Nations proved that football and creator culture are a stronger combination in MENA than anywhere else.
However, this region is still in its initial growth phase. As Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 investments mature, younger generations and digital natives are expanding their online habits, and GTA VI in the future, the MENA live broadcast audience will continue to grow. For gaming publishers and brands looking to reach an active and fast-growing audience, this data makes a strong case for placing MENA at the center of their streaming strategy.
Interested in more regional analysis? We also cover the State of Japanese Streaming in full here.
Or, to stay up to date on live streaming, follow Stream Hatchet and receive exclusive, newsletter-only content:
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.