EARespawn Entertainment’s surprise free to play battle royale game Apex Legends has been pulling in some incredible numbers since it launched last week.
The Titanfall spinoff recently blasted past the 25 million player mark, and is showing no signs of slowing down. Obviously, any fans of the much loved but criminally underperforming “core” Titanfall games have dared to hope that Apex Legends’ success might attract new players to Titanfall and Titanfall 2.
I’m happy to report that sometimes dreams do come true, as that’s exactly what’s happened.
EAAccording to the Apex Legends Subreddit, Titanfall 2 is really benefiting from the hype around Apex Legends. It seems that last night, around 10,000 people were playing the criminally underrated 2016 shooter on Xbox One.
Apparently, Titanfall 2 hasn’t really managed numbers close to that on Xbox One since 2017. This might have been helped by a recent discount on the game, but whatever gets people to finally play it is fine with me.
Over on PC there’s also been a demonstrable surge of interest in Titanfall 2. The game’s concurrent player count, has gone from 1,295 on December 20, 2018 to more than 3,400, according to a Reddit user who has been regularly keeping an eye on it.
EATitanfall 2 was a critical darling, but EA made the baffling choice to release the game between Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1 – two much more established FPS franchises.
Sales of the game obviously took a hit as a result, and EA later admitted that it’d maybe made a mistake releasing the game when it did.
If releasing a mega popular free to play spinoff to drive the numbers back to Titanfall 2 was all part of an elaborate plan from EA to make up for this mistake, then fair play.
EAHopefully this is the start of a new golden age for Titanfall. EA had previously said a new “premium” game set in the Titanfall universe would arrive by Fall 2020, but don’t expect to see Titanfall 3 anytime soon.
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.