Apex Legacy's shaky launch smashes viewership records, player counts—and servers
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter about Apex
Apex Legacy aimed high. There were updates to the game’s newest map, Olympus, a new weapon in the Bocek bow, a new character in Valkyrie, and the debut of Arenas mode, a round-based economy shooter in the style of Counter-Strike and Valorant. Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo was lit up in Apex ads, hyping one of the biggest updates to the game since launch.
Those high expectations met reality on Tuesday, when Legacy’s release immediately broke the game’s servers. It’s not unprecendented for the early days of an Apex season to have problems. Season 5’s patch frequently crashed the game, for example, and there were significant bugs in other seasons too, like the hit registration problems in Season 8. Other huge games suffer when they launch new content as well. Warzone’s recent Season 3 bomb event caused crashes and long queue times. But the Legacy update was a different beast. Simply put, for over two and a half hours, no one could play the game.
The impending launch attracted a massive amount of attention on social media, and in spite of the fact that the game was literally broken, Twitch viewership of Apex continued to climb, pulling in vast numbers of people. Most were watching streamers fail to connect to EA servers: either stuck at the title screen or in the game, but locked out of matchmaking. Streamers hoping to maintain record viewership counts on their channels combed through the patch notes or played around with the bow in the firing range, while others committed to ‘just chatting’ vibes, making the best of a bad situation.
Soon, Apex reached its highest number of viewers on Twitch since February of 2019, when nearly three quarters of a million tuned in to watch the game’s launch. Tuesday’s numbers peaked at 366,000 viewers—a highly impressive feat considering nobody was able to play the game. “This is a good time to announce that I’ll be going over to Fortnite,” joked the popular streamer NiceWigg, after nearly two hours of waiting on stream. Players vented on social media. Shiv entertained his 20,000 viewers at the title screen. Daltoosh began playing Geoguessr. Dr. Lupo, who rarely streams Apex, eventually lost patience and booted up Scavengers.
Two and a half hours after Legacy dropped, streamers began to get into games, but only with default legends. By then the massive viewership had tired of waiting too: Apex lost 100,000 viewers in less than an hour.
Six hours into the update, players still couldn’t select anything but the default legends and the marketplace was broken (or deactivated). All in all, it was a tough first day on the job for Valkyrie, the new legend, and for Respawn employees too.
“Today was challenging to say the least,” tweeted Alex Ackerman, a Senior Social Media Manager at Respawn, summing up the situation nicely. Intermittent outages continued into the night. But as servers came online, players lofted Apex to new heights on Steam:
By Thursday morning, Apex had smashed that number, hitting another all-time peak on Steam with 330,000 players, making it the third-most popular game on the platform behind CS:GO and DOTA 2. Server issues continued through Thursday evening as hordes of players tried out the new season, but as I tweeted at the time, Respawn’s communication regarding the downtime was prompt, direct and timely—a marked contrast from the frustrations of yore, when many days would go by without a centralized and official communication from the team.
It’s unfortunate that the undeniably shaky start to the new season obscured what most people following Apex already know—that the game has been gathering momentum for months.
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Everything else:
Apex recently topped IGN’s list of best battle royales, beating out Warzone and Fortnite.
Cloud9 returns to Apex: Knoqd, StayNaughty, and Zachmazer have been signed by the big, well-funded org. A great sign for the esports ecosystem.
Comp on console: Joseph De Anda, tireless liker of ALGS tweets and EA’s Competitive Gaming Partnerships Manager for Apex, revealed an update to the Legacy patch that lets console players join private tournament lobbies. Switch ALGS is about to pop off.
Community treasure and Liquipedia guru Jasper “Kano” Jacobs joined Alliance as a community manager! Big congrats to him.
Speaking of Alliance, they’ve signed their extremely talented Apex squad to a two-year contract extension.