Apex Legends Hits Another Huge Player Milestone

Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale game from Titanfall developer Respawn, continues to have a strong opening week. The game has now crossed 10 million players, with a record of more than 1 million concurrent players, Respawn announced in a blog post.

"This has been a truly incredible journey. We tested and tweaked. We argued and agreed. We got to a point where we felt some magic. We knew it would be risky to take the franchise in this direction, to go free to play, and do a surprise launch," Respawn founder Vince Zampella said. "But we fell in love with Apex Legends and wanted, needed, other people to play it too."

He added that the massive success of Apex Legends so far has exceeded the company's "wildest dreams." Zampella went on to say that launch is "just the beginning" for Apex Legends. As announced previously, the title will offer a Fortnite-style battle pass that will deliver seasons' worth of new content over time.

In fact, Respawn said it hopes the game can live on until 2027 or longer. Players can expect "exciting changes and gameplay evolutions" for the game as it progresses.

By comparison, the latest statistics from Epic Games show that Fortnite has 200 million players and a peak concurrent record of 8.3 million players. But Fortnite is a sensation unlike almost anything else.

Apex Legends was announced and released earlier this week on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It was a quick success, as it picked up 1 million players in eight hours, going on to reach 2.5 million players not much longer and a peak concurrent user record of 600,000 players. As today's numbers demonstrate, the game is enjoying a nice growth trajectory, and it'll be interesting to see how much bigger the game becomes over time.

Apex Legends is far from the first competitor to Fortnite and PUBG, but it's different in that it comes from a massive, established publisher in Electronic Arts.

In addition to Apex Legends, Respawn is working on something new in the Titanfall universe to release later this year, though whether or not it is the much-requested Titanfall 3 remains to be seen. Additionally, Respawn is developing a Star Wars game called Jedi: Fallen Order, and it is also slated to launch in 2019.