Apex Legends rapidly grows to 1 million players within 8 hours, surpassing Fortnite

Apex Legends Hits 1 Million Downloads in Less Than 8 Hours

Apex Legends, the highly anticipated game from developer Respawn Entertainment, was released yesterday and has already reached an impressive milestone. In just under eight hours, the game has been downloaded over 1 million times, as announced by Respawn CEO Vince Zamella.

I’m so overwhelmed right now, @PlayApex broke a million unique players in under 8 hours.
Thank you so much for showing up and being part of this with @Respawn you are amazing!! pic.twitter.com/lvNgfwwKhl
— Vince Zampella (@VinceZampella) February 5, 2019

This is an incredible achievement for any game. To put it into perspective, it took several days for the popular battle royale game Fortnite to reach the same milestone. Despite initial concerns about overcrowding in the battle royale genre, players are flocking to Apex Legends, a free-to-play game set in the Titanfall universe.

Respawn invested a significant amount of effort into the launch of Apex Legends. They partnered with top content creators on Twitch to live stream the game and boost its visibility on its first day. This strategy paid off, with various Apex Legends streams attracting over 500,000 simultaneous viewers. Currently, the game continues to attract over 400,000 viewers across different streams.

While it remains to be seen how long Apex Legends’ popularity will last, this is undoubtedly a major success for the development team, especially considering that they have entered a brand-new genre.