There’s surely been some corks popping on celebratory beverages and clinking of glasses at Respawn Entertainment this past month, as Apex Legends (opens in new tab) continues its steady climb among the peaks of gaming. The release on Season 14 last month saw the popular battle royale push to a new peak player count of 511,676 concurrent players, an approximately 47% increase over the previous month.
More subtle, but perhaps more important, the minimum and average daily peak players have grown significantly as well. That’s not always true with peak player record breaking months, and a subtle look at this year’s numbers for Apex show a steady trend. Apex Legends is now averaging a minimum of over 300,000 players at any given time—329,041 in August.
These are all numbers retrieved by SteamDB (opens in new tab), so they don’t include anyone playing Apex through the EA app on the Windows Store, nor the undoubtedly larger number of people playing on consoles. I’d bet my hat these numbers are going up on other major platforms as well.
A look at those minimum daily peak players numbers outlines a real success story for Apex Legends. They’re gaining more players in most months than many games on Steam sell copies, ever. Even after a series of months that net a decline in numbers, like September to December 2021, the following months reverse and more than make up for that trend. Apex is gaining 10,000 or more daily players every month.
In other Apex news, the battle royale that famously added self-revive is doing away with it (opens in new tab) after the player complains. There’s also a hilarious but extremely frustrating bug that was swapping players’ kits (opens in new tab), making one character have the moveset of another. Gibalkyrie or Pathwraith, anyone?
Cheers to PCGamesN (opens in new tab) for the spot