Apex Legends shatters its own player peak on Steam during record-setting season 14 launch

Apex Legends’ season 14 launch wasn’t exactly perfect, with Origin players initially struggling to download the season update, some momentary server stutters, and at least one new bug that switched character abilities between teammates. There were also some split opinions on the game’s newest character, Vantage, as well as changes to ranked and Kings Canyon.

One thing that wasn’t in question? The new season’s popularity with players. Despite launching in 2019 and adding support for players on Steam almost three years ago, Apex continues to set records for itself. This included the season 14 launch, which spurred the game to hit its highest ever concurrent player peak on Steam.

The new season launch was the first time the game has surpassed 500,000 players at the same time on the platform, a massive achievement for any game. There are only two games sitting above Apex in Steam’s current players charts at the moment: perennial favorites CS:GO and Dota 2.

Of course, the actual number of players on Apex across Steam, Origin, and the various consoles the game can be played on is likely much higher than this concurrent player mark. Steam is just the only platform that constantly tracks how many players are playing different games at all times, meaning it’s a useful tool to see the relative popularity of certain titles.

It was only a year and a half ago that Apex first closed in on 200,000 concurrent players on Steam for the first time, and a few months since the game set a new record for itself by breaking the 400,000 player mark. With today’s news, it doesn’t appear that the game is slowing down any time soon.

Even with an imperfect launch and questions regarding how the game is currently playing and functioning for players at all skill levels, Apex is arguably more popular now than it ever has been, its explosion in popularity upon launch notwithstanding. And if that popularity can be sustained and continue to grow, players will have many more years of Apex content to look forward to.