Home Gaming Apex Legends sticking to seasons, won’t emulate Fortnite’s content pace

Apex Legends sticking to seasons, won’t emulate Fortnite’s content pace

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Yesterday, Fortnite developer Epic games came under fire for its culture of crunch. The game’s sudden and immense popularity sent its developers into dev overdrive, with staff reportedly regularly working 70-hour-long weeks to keep that steady stream of content and patches flowing.

Respawn’s Apex Legends was meant to be the game that disrupted Fortnite’s domination of the free-to-play Battle Royale scene. It’s a good game whose launch popularity was bolstered by an influencer-led campaign that saw the game’s numbers skyrocket past 50 million players in its first month. For a while, it seemed to have really put a massive dent into Fortnite’s player base, as well as cut into its Twitch and YouTube viewership.

That interest has plummeted, however, and interest in Respawn’s Battle Royale is quickly waning. A report by Seeking Alpha suggests that references to Apex Legends in Google search trends and Twitchmetrics have shown a steep drop in searches and Twitch views. Viewership of the game is down to just 30 000 viewers (as of last week) from a peak of nearly 400 000 viewers.

According to Seeking Alpha, Apex now only has 10% of the Google searches that Fortnite has, around 20 per cent of its Twitch viewers and just 4% of its YouTube searches. In a separate report from Stream Elements, it looks like Fortnite dropped below 100M hours watched on Twitch when Apex Legends hit, but by March not only bounced back but hit 118M hours.

The general consensus is that Apex’s growth was inorganic and boosted by popular Streamers. As they’ve moved away from the game, so have their audiences. While watched hours don’t exactly correlate to the number of people playing, when taken together with the Google and YouTube searches, they suggest that Apex’s player base isn’t stagnant, it’s dropping. Anecdotally, I have to say that very nearly none of my friends play Apex any more. There are probably a number of reasons for that, but I think the primary reason that it’s just not matching up to Fortnite is in its slower development.

Epic has been incredible at constantly updating Fortnite Battle Royale with new content, seasons, skins and more that it has a highly engaged audience. Respawn has not been able to even remotely match that pace, leaving players to find their thrills elsewhere. Fortnite’s constant updates, however, have come at a very real human cost, one that Respawn isn’t keen on.

Speaking at the Gamesbeat summit, Respawn CEO Vince Zampella explained that Apex was always going to have its new content dropped on a seasonal basis, as opposed to the steady stream of content Fortnite receives.

“Our intention was to always be seasonal, so we’re kind of staying with that,” says Zampella. “The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that.”

That’s a nice sentiment, but the unfortunate reality is that most consumers really don’t seem to care. They want new content, and they want it yesterday.

Last Updated: April 25, 2019

12 Comments

  1. Admiral Chief Flammenwerfer

    April 25, 2019 at 09:55

    How’s the PUBG scene these days?

    I still watch chocoTaco videos almost every day (YouTube), and the entertainment factor is there big time.

    Playing it though…there are some really boring parts…

    Reply

    • Geoffrey Tim

      April 25, 2019 at 10:06

      PUBG still doing really well, making tons of bank.

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief Flammenwerfer

        April 25, 2019 at 10:14

        Viewership?

        Reply

        • Geoffrey Tim

          April 25, 2019 at 10:15

          Not a sodding clue, but plenty of players, plenty of cash. I find it too boring to watch.

          Reply

          • Admiral Chief Flammenwerfer

            April 25, 2019 at 10:22

            Hence why I watch the summaries on YT. Wayyyyyyy more entertaining

  2. HairyEwok

    April 25, 2019 at 10:30

    People leave Apex due to it’s horrid hit registration, and the fact that they can’t fix the slow-mo servers and hit registration adds to it. Something about that they cant replicate the problem on their dev servers so they have to write new code to get it from client servers.

    Reply

  3. CrAiGiSh

    April 25, 2019 at 14:31

    Game is fun but there is nothing pulling you back 🙁

    Reply

  4. Magoo

    April 25, 2019 at 10:30

    The issue isn’t necessarily the lack of new, exciting content or events, it’s the lack of basic development. Things like stat tracking, different game modes, game breaking bugs and horrendous server performance. There has been little to no actual development since launch. Just a legend, a weapon that nobody really uses and some nerfs.

    The battle pass was underwhelming and they got a lot of flak for it. 20 of the 100 rewards are just a visual badge update, 27 rewards are legend-specific stat tracking for season 1, etc. I did get the battle pass but there are literally only 2 rewards I am looking forward to, of the 100 I will get.

    Admittedly it’s still a great game, it just has a lot of room for improvement. And it’s like the improvements are blaringly obvious and some almost seem like quick-fixes. Respawn originally promised to update everyone daily on the state of the game but since that day, they don’t even release weekly updates. Every time they do talk it’s “we don’t have anything to announce”.

    I really think that they do not share the vision that the players have or think that they do.

    Reply

  5. Guild

    April 25, 2019 at 10:55

    I enjoyed Apex and still do occasionally but thing for me is other games released like Division 2 and I must say the underwhelming Apex Season Pass also didn’t really get me back full time into it.

    Reply

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