The free to play battle royale Apex Legends is off to an incredibly strong start, as EA revealed the Titanfall spinoff managed to attract over 2.5 million players on day one.
Developer Respawn, along with EA, apparently decided to release the game on the same day as it was announced because they weren’t sure how people would react to the concept of a Titanfall battle royale.
Obviously this was the right call, and giving sceptics a chance to play immediately after the reveal was a very smart way to win the crowd over.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson said during a meeting with investors (via Yahoo Finance) that Apex Legend’s launch was EA’s biggest ever reveal on Twitch in terms of peak and concurrent viewers, and they weren’t lacking for players after launch either.
Wilson explained:
In the first 24 hours, we’ve had over 2.5 million unique users, training fast toward 3 million unique users, and nearly 600,000 peak and current users in the middle of a Tuesday, so it’s very early, but the response to the game has been very, very strong.
These are undoubtedly impressive numbers, no doubt helped by the buzz around the surprise launch and the fact the game is free to play. It’s also very, very good and if you haven’t checked it out yet I fully suggest you remedy that.
Whether or not Apex Legends is surviving off of the initial launch hype or becomes a force to be reckoned with on the battle royale scene remains to be seen right now, given it’s still early days. I’d be inclined to believe the latter, though.
In other Titanfall news, EA plans to capitalise on the (expected) success of Apex Legends by releasing a premium game set in the Titanfall universe sometime in Fall 2019, but it’s definitely not Titanfall 3.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.