Apex Legends Going on Strong on Steam
Apex Legends continues to gain players on Steam. With the release of season 8, at the peak moment of the day, the game had nearly 200,000 simultaneous players.
Electronic Arts for a long time resisted returning the games from its catalog to sale on Steam. But when it finally happened, we didn't have to wait long for the effects in the form of good sales. This in turn resulted not only in the launch of EA Play subscription on Valve's store, but also a significant increase in the popularity of previously released EA games. The crowning example of this is the success of Apex Legends, which reached a new popularity record Steam in the 8th season. Yesterday, the title developed by Respawn Entertainment had almost 197 thousand users playing at the same time (via Steam Charts).
Of course, this is a "record" only for Apex Legends, and not for the whole Steam. Respawn Entertainment's work still does not match the popularity of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, which even in the worst moments has an average of over 160,000 players at the same time (not to mention the truly record-breaking results from years ago). Nonetheless, the fifth place on the list of the most popular games on Steam clearly shows how many users appreciated Apex Legends.
In part, the influx of new players is due to the launch of the aforementioned 8th season at the beginning of the month. It brought with it another character (albeit without a new map), but also a celebration of the 2nd anniversary of the game's surprise release in 2019 and - as always - a new battle pass. The desire to win rewards prepared by the developers (including skins and other cosmetic items) clearly motivates the players to more frequent sessions with the title. This probably also translates to in-game spending, although at this point we have no data on the player interest in microtransactions in February.
The success of Apex Legends can also be seen on Twitch. At the time of writing this text, the game is in top ten most watched titles with over 60 thousand viewers. This is still two times less than the result of PUBG, but EA definitely has no reasons to complain. After all, the publisher has learned the hard way that a game focused on playing with others can do much worse.
