Apex Legends hits 10 million players in three days – when it took Fortnite a fortnight

Apex Legends
Image credit: EA

Apex Legends seems to be going from strength to strength; after managing to reach a million players in its first eight hours, the free-to-play battle royale shooter has now hit 10 million players in three days flat.

That’s incredibly good going, particularly when you consider that it took Fortnite two weeks – a fortnight, rather appropriately – to reach the same milestone. It took Fortnite 24 hours to accrue a million players, compared to eight hours for EA’s shooter, as we already mentioned.

Vince Zampella, chief executive of developer Respawn, posted a message to players in celebration of reaching the 10 million mark – and noted that the game had achieved over a million concurrent players.

Zampella said: “We knew it would be risky to take the franchise in this direction, to go free to play, and do a surprise launch. But we fell in love with Apex Legends and wanted, needed, other people to play it too.”

Top of Twitch

It certainly hasn’t hurt the game that big-name Twitch streamers have picked up on it. Indeed, Apex Legends has been topping Twitch viewing figures since its launch, and is still in pole position at the time of writing, with just shy of 140,000 viewers, considerably outstripping second-place League of Legends which is on 102,000.

If you haven’t tried Apex Legends yet, there’s obviously nothing stopping you from giving it a shot, as it’s free. While the game is a traditional battle royale affair, of course, it’s a somewhat different spin on the formula, as it kind of crosses Fortnite with Overwatch. Teams of three are pitted against each other, with each player able to choose one of eight different character classes.

While Apex Legends is obviously off to a great start, there’s still a long way to go in catching Fortnite which had a player base of 200 million as of November 2018.

Via MCV

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).