Apex Legends has crossed the 25 million player threshold in just a week. At the same time, Titanfall 2, a two-year-old first-person shooter also by Respawn Entertainment, is seeing a resurgence in popularity alongside growing obsession with Apex Legends.
EA announced this week that Apex Legends, which came out on February 4 has more than 25 million players and had "well over 2 million concurrent players at our peak" in its first weekend.
In case you've missed all the news about Apex Legends over the last week: it's a new free-to-play battle royale made by Respawn and published by Electronic Arts. The game differentiates itself from the likes of Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in several ways, some of the biggest ways are its respawn mechanic and an emphasis on fast-paced movement.
Titanfall 2's Resurgence
The game was instantly popular. It reached more than 1 million players in under eight hours and hit 10 million in less than 72. It's also become a fixture of Twitch and YouTube, although that's also been true of other titles, most of which then faded into near-obscurity as many content creators moved back to games like Fortnite. But the point is that calling Apex Legends a success (at least at launch) would be an understatement.
And it seems like much of that success has trickled down to Titanfall 2, Respawn's preceding first-person shooter. The game debuted in October 2016 and was mostly praised for its single-player campaign. It had multiplayer as well, but it wasn't nearly as popular as competitive-focused titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch even at launch. However, according to Games Radar today, Redditors have reported that the number of Titanfall 2's concurrent players has risen across the board since Apex Legends debuted. The PC version's active users jumped from an average of 1,000 up to 3,500; the PlayStation 4 version's rose from 3,000 to 5,000; and the Xbox One version's doubled from 5,000 to 10,000. All told, that's an extra 9,500 people.
Those numbers pale in comparison to Apex Legends, of course, but any increase for a two-year-old game is notable. It's not like there's a community event going on, which sometimes happens for less-than-new titles, either. Folks just like Apex Legends enough to check out Titanfall 2.
The good news is that Respawn and EA have both said that a "premium" game in the Titanfall universe is set to debut later this year.
