Marvel Rivals Grabbing Apex Legends Players

Since its launch, Apex Legends has been a dominant free-to-play hero shooter. However, the game's popularity has fallen since last season, as EA has mostly overlooked fans' expectations. While Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts have been adding new Legends to the game every season, From the Rift, the 23rd Season of Apex Legends, which launched on November 5, returned to the original Legends, Kings Canyon.

Even though plenty of new updates were added to the game over the last few years, Apex Legends experienced a significant downfall in terms of player count earlier this month. This downfall raised plenty of doubts about whether the game is at its final moment or if there's still a chance for Respawn to revive the game since Marvel Rivals turned out to be everything the hero shooter genre fans wanted.

Marvel Rivals, on the other hand, boasted 10 million players within 72 hours after its launch. The game peaked at a whooping 480,990 player counts this week with 250,000+ constant current players. And it's been reported that a lot of these players were actually active players in Apex Legends. So this puts EA under pressure since they failed to motivate the Apex Legends community over the last few months to stay in the game.

Stuart Cranfield, EA's chief financial officer, revealed that the game had experienced a year-on-year decline. The good news is that Cranfield believes this decline improved sequentially and ultimately returned to expectations. The company did not reveal new information about player numbers during that call, so the actual number is unknown, although it corresponds to the figure above.

So, where exactly is Apex Legends heading? We know EA also targeted the mobile industry with a lightly modified version of this game for smartphones w, which was available for a while but was removed in 2023. Then, one of the finest coaches in Apex history, Raven, indicated that he would retire after ALGS in January.

There is still a lot of time before that happens so that he may change his mind. He was moving on to other things; however, it is crucial to remember that even when the game was having better days, people were still retiring because their thoughts and lives changed. Raven explicitly stated that the game was struggling, which was one of his key reasons.

The Steam player count for Apex Legends rose marginally in August but then fell sharply in September and October. The November Steam charts showed an all-green scenario with a gain of +7.36%, which equated to a 6,259 increase in average players from October to November. It is also crucial to note that these are only Steam charts and do not accurately reflect what is happening on consoles, which we do not have.

Since the Steam player count numbers were falling and things were looking bleak, Apex Legends fans hope that these things do not continue to happen. Last week, we saw some good news, but what about the numbers that we could pay attention to in the last 30 days and how Apex Legends appears to be doing, given that they hit one of the worst all-time lows in October?

They sort of came out with an article showing some of these numbers and talking about EA's earnings calls, and they said that in 2024, the Apex Legends player count was 18 million active monthly users, as confirmed by EA in their fiscal year.

The console version has the most active player base out there. When we compare Apex Legends to some of the other games out there, we can see that Apex Legends currently has a 91,030-day average compared to Counter-Strike's 853,000, although Counter-Strike is only a PC game.

On the other hand, Apex has a much larger pool of numbers to pull from on the platform, but Counter-Strike would likely do the same if it were a console game. According to Steam stats, Team Fortress 2 is in the finals, but other variables to consider include the Blizzard Battle.net launcher, which launches some of these games, and Call of Duty, which has a 160,030-day average.

EA's goal with Apex Legends is not only to keep the game stable or make it but also to make the game actually balanced again, which would require some big incentive to get them to come back. Fans are hoping Respawn will take much less time to achieve this target since if they delay this too long, hero shooters like Marvel Rivals will grab their player base.