Free-to-play Titanfall battle title Apex Legends has flown out of the gate with developer Respawn claiming that 10m people have played the game in its first 72 hours in the wild.
In a blog post on publisher EA's website, Respawn chief and co-founder Vince Zampella (pictured) wrote that Apex Legends hit a peak of one million concurrent players, too, which certainly shows that consumers are engaged with the battle royale title.
Within eight hours of launch, the title had attracted one million players with EA saying during its financial call that this figure had grown to three million in its first 24 hours out.
"This has been a truly incredible journey," Zampella said.
"We tested and tweaked. We argued and agreed. We got to a point where we felt some magic. We knew it would be risky to take the franchise in this direction, to go free to play, and do a surprise launch. But we fell in love with Apex Legends and wanted, needed, other people to play it too.
"We hoped you’d love it as much as us, but never in our wildest dreams could we have expected the outpouring of support and positivity we’ve seen. From all of us at Respawn, thank you for giving us and Apex Legends a chance. Thank you for joining us on this journey. This is just the beginning! We have so much more in store for you this year."
We are still in the game's launch window, with the surprise announcement meaning that much of Apex Legends' traction will be coming via word-of-mouth excitement, so people are dropping in to check it out.
It'll be interesting to see whether the Titanfall battle royale game manages to retain its audience. Lest we forget that Hi-Rez Studios' Realm Royale boasted a strong player base on launch, with 94 per cent of those users dropping away in the following two months.
Speaking to media ahead of Apex Legends' launch, developers from Respawn said that this was the Titanfall game that the studio was working on for the near future and that a third numbered entry in the sci-fi mech shooter franchise wasn't on the way. But Respawn apparently is working on a new premium game for the IP, which EA claims will be out this year.
That's on top of its Star Wars game Jedi: Fallen Order, which was unceremoniously announced at the publisher's EA Play event at E3 2018 with... Zampella being awkwardly interviewed in the audience and dropping the name.
