Apex Legends tops 10 million players, one million concurrent
In eight hours, Apex Legends topped one million players. In less than four days, it climbed over 10 million with one million constantly playing.
Despite springing a light leak a few days in advance, Respawn Entertainment surprised the gaming world with a brand new shooter that was not Titanfall. It was, however, Titanfall adjacent, setting a battle royale experience within the world of giant mechs. It doesn't feature those mechs, but it does feature some surprisingly polished content at launch and that has quickly carried the game to 10 million players with one million concurrent.
Apex Legends is a free-to-play battle royale that functions entirely in first-person with three-player squads. The game incorporates unique characters called Legends and they all have a passive ability, special action, and ultimate that can turn the tide of firefights. It's an interesting mixture of elements from games like Call of Duty's Blackout and Overwatch, but it seems to be working. The game reached over one million players in less than eight hours and catapulted to over 10 million in less than four days. Here's the letter to fans written by Vince Zampella of Respawn Entertainment:
In 72 hours, over 10 million players have jumped into Apex Legends and we’ve breached 1 million concurrent players!
This has been a truly incredible journey. We tested and tweaked. We argued and agreed. We got to a point where we felt some magic. We knew it would be risky to take the franchise in this direction, to go free to play, and do a surprise launch. But we fell in love with Apex Legends and wanted, needed, other people to play it too.
We hoped you’d love it as much as us, but never in our wildest dreams could we have expected the outpouring of support and positivity we’ve seen. From all of us at Respawn, thank you for giving us and Apex Legends a chance. Thank you for joining us on this journey. This is just the beginning! We have so much more in store for you this year.
See you in the arena!
Some were a bit sour at the arrival of Apex Legends for a couple reasons, one being the lack of mechs and the other being that the developers confirmed that Titanfall 3 wasn't currently in development. It likely won't be in heavy development any time soon, either, considering Electronic Arts just confirmed that Respawn Entertainment's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order will be launched in 2019. If the company's success with Apex Legends doesn't completely taper off and the team somehow overcomes EA's recent track record with Star Wars games, the studio will be in a great position to deliver a fantastic new entry in the Titanfall universe.
Apex Legends by Respawn Entertainment is available now and free-to-play on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Get a handle on the Apex Legends characters' abilities, passives, and ultimates and stay tuned to Shacknews for additional gaming and tech updates.
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replyCharles Singletary Jr posted a new article, Apex Legends tops 10 million players, one million concurrent
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Wow, shit that's a lot of players. Anthem is jealous.
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Seems like they will land a firm #3 spot in the BR genre in terms of player count. I would bet there is mostly diminishing returns here for other games that might try to take a piece.
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PUBG will probably eventually go f2p. Also PUBG mobile is killing it.
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Fortnite already owns the market for kids/teens and their aesthetic pulls in casual players. Pubg owns the market for “realism” and the military FPS crowd, and has a significant advantage in being first. As cool as Apex is, it is fighting over the scraps (with blackout) and doesn’t have a way to pull those other markets into their own. It’s sci-fi look isn’t going to hit as broadly and their characters, while cool, don’t have the personality of something like Overwatch.
I like Apex, but I will be shocked if they ever get to 50 million players (substantially less than Pubg who’s in 2nd place.) Still a huge success at 10 million so quickly.
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It really depends on how their support goes from here, but they're off to a great start. These games seem to live or die long term based on how well they engage with the community and keep the updates and new ideas coming. Epic are master at that clearly. If they can somehow get their tech running on mobile it will be a huge boost too obviously, but i've got a feeling that's going to take a lot of work.
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Yeah I havent played it yet, so I can't really speak to how greedy their setup is, and EA certainly has a bad reputation. We'll just have to see, Respawn seem to have a healthy relationship with EA, they're not just a typical pawn studio that EA walks all over. They were pretty clear that EA had almost no input in Apex thus far.
I can see it going either way to be honest.
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In terms of active player count it is already past PUBG (given that Apex has easily surpassed 1M since this was announced).
https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
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