Apex Legends’ Steam player count drops in wake of ALGS hacking scare

Hacking wreaked havoc on Apex Legends Global Series action over the weekend, and it’s potentially scaring players away from logging into the battle royale.

Since Apex Legends Season 20 started in February, the player count on Steam increased 27 percent from the previous month and reached its highest total peak since June 2023 at 469,000 players according to data provided by Steam Charts. Player count has generally hovered between 420,000 and 460,000 concurrent users, but over the past 24 hours that number dropped to around 370,000. The big decrease in player count coincidentally corresponds with the hacking scare that happened on March 17.

During the ALGS North American Regional Final, several pro players, such as DarkZero’s Genburten and TSM’s ImperialHal, were granted game-breaking cheats because of a security breach. The Apex esports team was forced to issue a statement and postpone the NA finals “due to the competitive integrity of the series being compromised.” The source of the hacking incident was all but confirmed to be Destroyer2009 after the pro players received messages from the notorious cheater during the ALGS matches.

Apex‘s anti-cheat, Easy Anti-Cheat, attempted to assure fans by confirming there was an investigation and that the team was “confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited.” However, before the official announcement, some Apex community members uninstalled the title out of fear that they would be hacked, and subsequently banned.

If there truly is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited, it would suggest this is an isolated incident in Apex and not an EA-wide security breach. Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) also provides its services to other titles such as Fortnite, Battlefield 2042, Dead By Deadlight, and an extensive catalog of more. Players of other titles can breathe a sigh of relief knowing they aren’t impacted by the breach, but even after words of reassurance, Apex players are hesitant to log back on. It’s unclear what the devs will have to do to restore community faith after such an alarming hack.