The Apex Legends Global Series has started its first week of competition in all four regions, but initial viewership numbers failed to keep up with past split one opening days, likely due to one important spectator feature that has left many fans confused.
Command Center (CC), the official multi-stream option for watching the ALGS, silently moved all operations from Twitch to FACEIT, without any announcement or notification to viewers from any official Apex media account. Although the ALGS is broadcast on multiple platforms like YouTube, CC was a built-in stream option exclusive to Twitch and allowed fans to spectate up to four different team perspectives alongside the main broadcast, and even featured an updated map and stats stream for each game.Â
CC disappeared entirely at the start of the split one broadcast for EMEA with all features now moved over to FACEIT Watch and the new Apex Legends category, the second game in the website’s esports streaming service after Counter-Strike 2.
However, the platform transition has been plagued by problems that have significantly brought down the viewer experience and led to multiple complaints about the decision to move from Twitch to FACEIT. The initial EMEA broadcast lagged heavily throughout all six games, only had the map and main streams working, and struggled to load four stream perspectives at once—problems that Twitch’s plug-in handled without any issue in the past.
Command Center’s biggest draw was not just the ability to spectate a certain team but listen in to their communications as well, giving valuable insight to players and teams who don’t normally stream their perspectives. Although the NA broadcast fixed the stream issues and let spectators watch each team’s perspective, sound issues caused only the game audio to broadcast from the stream, completely missing the team communications for multiple orgs which went unresolved until the final game and leaderboard standings.
In comparison, any participating Pro League player can broadcast their tournament perspective and full team audio with a 10-minute stream delay. However, not every team is guaranteed to have at least one player streaming their games. Despite being one of the longest-standing and most successful NA rosters, no one on OpTic Gaming streamed their perspective on Twitch and there would be no footage of them if not for Command Center’s team stream, which loses more of its value without each player’s audio.
Additionally, viewers must sign in or create a FACEIT account to use Command Center, bringing questions about possible future paywalls to access the stream feature while Twitch viewers could use CC as guests without having to create an account at all. All of these issues have called Respawn’s commitment to CC into question for Year Four of the ALGS, especially with announcements made in past years declaring the dev’s commitment to monitoring and fixing problems concerning the feature.
The absence of CC from Twitch and the lack of communication from Respawn or EA about the platform switch to FACEIT have caused a significant decrease in the viewership numbers for the opening day of the 2024 ALGS. According to Esports Charts, day one viewership peaked at 110,000 viewers on all platforms—a 30 percent decrease from the previous 2023 Split One peak, showing CC’s influence on the overall ALGS viewer experience when offered multiple team perspectives.
Dot Esports has reached out to Respawn Entertainment for a comment concerning the changes but has not received a response at the time of publishing.
