Apex Legends, a popular battle royale style video game, has gained enormous popularity within the first month of its release. Hitting 1 million concurrent users within the first 8 hours, 2.5 million users within the first day, and 10 million users within the first 3 days, the game that was not marketed at all needless to say, blew up.
I should preface this by saying that Apex Legends is a great game, and it’s done a tremendous job gaining traction. Looking through Apex Legends’ ratings, the game seems well accepted by critics:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_Legends
However, is this growth sustainable?
According to Thomas Rice, an Australian financial portfolio manager, Apex Legends has grown at such an unprecedented rate:
Fortnite helped lay the groundwork for players to become familiar and adopt the “battle royale” style of gaming, which could have expedited the adoption curve for Apex Legends.
Was the new release of Apex Legends just a fad? Was it just a breath of fresh air from Fortnite?
It looked like Apex Legends was poised to surpass Fortnite in popularity. One month later, what started to happen?
Comparing three similar style games, PUBG, Fortnite, and Apex Legends, we can see how popular the games were through google searches. *Keep in mind that this is not a directly correlated with hours of gameplay or total concurrent users, and that this only potentially shows mindshare.*
Apex Legends blew up on its release week, and stayed in the media spotlight for another week or so. However, it appears that a decline in searches and thus potential downloads and mindshare has started to form.
Will this mean a sharp decline in the growth, thus the popularity and “time in the spotlight”, of Apex Legends in the near future? Is Apex Legends on its last few minutes of its 15 minutes of fame? What do you think? Comment down below.
Supply Chen Management 