Apex Legends overtakes Baldur’s Gate 3 on Steam thanks to Final Fantasy 7 crossover

Apex Legends‘ first crossover with another franchise appears to be a successful one as the game is currently sitting at the top of the Steam best sellers, knocking Baldur’s Gate 3 down to second place.

Admittedly, the Steam Deck is technically still the top seller according to Steam’s charts, but if you’re only taking into account actual video games and not hardware, Apex Legends holds the crown, outperforming other popular multiplayer titles like Lethal Company and Counter-Strike 2. Given the timing, it has to be thanks to the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth collaboration, which went live on Jan. 9 and added a new mode as well as cosmetics based on Square Enix’s RPG.

SteamDB also shows a noticeable uptick in players. Before the event went live, concurrent player counts were below 300,000 but soon peaked at 345,718. Player numbers are admittedly not as strong as they were in November (according to Steam Charts, the average player count has actually dropped in the last month), but these statistics are only for one version of the game. Apex Legends is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch too, so things could be better on those formats. Season 19 of Apex also launched in November, and season updates are historically when the game’s player count are highest.

There has been some contention surrounding the crossover regarding the cosmetics of this event, specifically their pricing. There are 36 unique items to acquire from the event packs, leading to fears a complete collection would set you back almost $360 since packs typically cost 1,000 Apex coins, which are equivalent to $9.99.

Turns out that’s not entirely the case, as Respawn reduced the cost of event packs to 100 coins for the first event pack you buy, but the price goes up depending on how many of the Final Fantasy 7 items you own. Once you acquire at least 16 of them, the packs shoot back up to 1,000 coins.

Unless Respawn or EA says otherwise, the crossover event seems to have been worth doing and could very well encourage EA to go full Fortnite/Call of Duty and push more crossovers in future seasons.