Apex Legends now boasts 25m players and 2m concurrent in just a week

EA’s surprise battle royale release, Apex Legends, picked up over 10 million players in just 72 hours of its debut release. Now, just one week later, it’s boasting 25 million players.

Apex Legends – a free-to-play battle royale game set within the Titanfall universe – released suddenly last week and made a huge impact, attracting one million unique players in the first eight hours. It’s now hit two million concurrent players and remains one of the most popular game on Twitch.

"What a week! Since we launched Apex Legends last week on Monday we’ve seen the creation of an Apex Legends community that is excited, thriving, and full of great feedback and ideas," said Vince Zampella. "Our goal is to build this game with you, our community, so keep giving us your feedback because we really are listening. I can’t tell you everything we have planned, and we are looking at changes based on player feedback and experiences."

"We’re also thrilled to announce that since last Monday, more than 25 million players have jumped into the game, and over the weekend we had well over 2 million concurrent players at our peak. Like I said earlier, what a week!" he added. "From everyone here at Respawn, thank you. The community’s excitement for Apex Legends is electric, and we feel it here at the studio. We couldn’t have gotten where we are without you and look forward to having you on this journey with us."

Niko Partner analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out on Twitter (thanks, GI.biz) that its peak concurrent users – currently at 2 million – already exceeds those of FIFA 18.

"One other stat is that Apex Legends has hit 2 million peak concurrent users (PCCU) within 1 week. It took Fortnite 16 weeks to hit 2m concurrent players. Fortnite’s PCCU is now 8.3m," Ahmad wrote. "It’s higher than FIFA 18 which hit 1.6m PCCU. PUBG PCCU on Steam is 3.2m."

Of course, there’s still some way to go before Apex Legends can be considered a real threat to Fortnite’s battle royale dominance. Fortnite has reportedly earned $455 million on iOS in 2018, earning Epic roughly $1.6 million every day since it launched on the Apple store in March 2018. Epic Games’ earned $69 million through its fan-favourite battle royale game in just December last year, during which it was downloaded 5.2 million times – up 52 per cent from November 2018, and up 83 per cent on its previous strongest month – making it Fortnite’s biggest month to date.

In its third quarter briefing, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew House acknowledged Q3 was a "difficult quarter" for the company, admitting the publisher/developer "did not perform to [its] expectations" despite the launch of Battlefield V and Command & Conquer: Rivals during the reporting period.

"The video game industry continues to grow through a year of intense competition and transformational change," CEO Andrew Wilson said at the time. "Q3 was a difficult quarter for Electronic Arts and we did not perform to our expectations. We are now applying the strengths of our company to sharpen our execution and focus on delivering great new games and long-term live services for our players. We’re very excited about Apex Legends, the upcoming launch of Anthem, and a deep line-up of new experiences that we’ll bring to our global communities next fiscal year."