Apex Legends sees 37% drop in popularity after the start of Season 13-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Apex Legends Season 13 key art (pic: EA)

The number of people playing and watching Apex Legends has seen a sharp decrease over the last month and no-one’s quite sure why.

It’s rarely easy to tell how popular specific video games are, because publishers almost never release detailed sales figures, but it’s all but impossible for most online-only titles.

As far as most people are concerned Apex Legends is one of the most popular free-to-play games around but if you judge it by the number of viewers on Twitch it’s recently seen a significant dip.

Clearly, Twitch viewership isn’t the ideal way to measure a game’s success but it’s one of the only ways for digital titles and how many people are watching is very important for a game like Apex Legends.

In May, the average number of concurrent people watching Apex Legends was 109,000, up from 92,000 in April. And yet in June that number fell by 37% to 69,000.

That represents a drop in the total number of hours watched from 81 million to 50 million, the lowest figure since December 2021.

The numbers are down (pic: SullyGnome)

Although it’s not a busy time of year for games, in any capacity, none of the other big name games saw a major drop, with Call Of Duty: Warzone down 8%, Fortnite down 6% and Valorant actually up by 1.5%.

The current season is now in its second month but there isn’t usually any major drop off until much closer to the next one. Some fans have blamed the changes to how Ranked matches work for the drop in interest, since it’s put off some streamers from playing the game, but that alone doesn’t seem to account for it.

The total number of streamers for Apex Legends has fallen by 13% recently but while that’s significant it’s still not close to the drop in how many people are watching.

Season 14 starts in August, so you can expect EA to make an extra big fuss over that, in an attempt to win back players and viewers as the autumn months begin to get closer.

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