Epic Games' free-to-play battle royale title Fortnite has overtaken rival title Apex Legends in Twitch viewership.

That's according to data from analytics and tracking platform SullyGnome, which shows that for the last seven days up to the time of writing, Fortnite boasted the highest watch time on Twitch at 25.3m hours. This places it ahead of Apex Legends' 20.3m hours.

Meanwhile, for the last three days, Epic's battle royale was watched for 10.2m hours compared to Apex Legends' 8.6m.

When it launched, Respawn and EA's take on the battle royale genre became one of the most-watched games on Twitch, at its peak boasting three times as many hours watched compared to Fortnite.

Given that Apex Legends was a surprise release with close to no marketing campaign, it's hardly surprising that the game was popular on streaming platforms as consumers wanted to know more about this new launch. Well, we say there was no marketing campaign - publisher EA and developer Respawn partnered with some of the biggest games influencers on the planet, which will also have been a large factor behind Apex Legends' popularity on platforms such as Twitch.

Now that the launch hype window is over, it's not surprising that Fortnite is stealing back viewership, especially with Epic Games rolling out the eighth season of content at the end of February.

That's not to say that Apex Legends hasn't been hugely successful. Respawn announced that the game had attracted over 50m users in its first four weeks in the wild, which is not to be laughed out.

Within eight hours of launch, one million people had played the Titanfall-themed free-to-play battle royale game, a figure that had tripled by the end of Apex Legends' first 24 hours post-release. Within three days, ten million people had given the shooter a shot. By the end of the title's first fortnight, it had been played by 25m gamers.

Apex Legends also launched just days before EA's most recent financial call, where the publishing giant announced that it had missed its guidance overall, and that Battlefield V had sold one million units less than its forecasts. The swift and early success of Respawn's battle royale game led to EA's stock price experiencing a resurgence.