Apex Legends is doing really well. It is doing better than that actually since the number of users that have played Apex Legends is now outpacing Fortnite, which is the current global champion in the Battle Royale genre.
Fortnite had a modest start as it opened to 10 million players in 2 weeks, but it took 4 months or 16 weeks for Fortnite to hit 45 million players. It exploded afterward once Epic Games released a mobile version for it.
Apex Legends hit 50 Million players worldwide! We are humbled by all your support and can’t wait to show you what’s next. pic.twitter.com/QTDH57lfvB
— Apex Legends (@PlayApex) March 4, 2019
Compared to Fortnite, Apex Legends has done well. It is outpacing the player count of Fortnite and currently ahead with 50 million players confirmed to have enjoyed Apex Legends in just 4 weeks. This is a massive jump from Fortnite, but with the lack of a mobile game, this might not increase with the same rate a Fortnite.
Niko Partners analyst Danial Ahmed has shared the data on both Fortnite and Apex Legends talking about the insane success of the latter in a set of tweets.
Number of Apex Legends players after:
8 hours – 1m
1 day – 2.5m
3 days – 10m
1 week – 25m
4 weeks – 50mNumber of Fortnite BR players after:
2 weeks – 10m
6 weeks – 20m
11 weeks – 30m
16 weeks – 45m— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 4, 2019
Fortnite launched its mobile version once it was around 50m players and that allowed it to grow to over 200m players today.
Apex Legends doesn't have a mobile ver. yet so it won't reach those numbers until it has some sort of mobile release.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 4, 2019
So the thing to take here is that while Apex Legends is growing at a much faster pace, there are some questions on how EA is planning to monetize all of this user engagement. Fortnite has battle pass while Apex Legends is still going through the initial wave of support and the implementation for monetization is low as the game is free-to-play right now.
In any case, this is an impressive result which will be interesting to see in the near future as the two games keep claiming the top spots in the Battle Royale genre.
