Earlier this week Respawn Entertainment launched the thirteenth season of Apex Legends. The update included a significant weapon rebalancing, a Ranked Reloaded rework of Apex Legends' competitive queue, and a new Legend named Newcastle, among other things. It's a solid addition to Apex Legends, and is apparently exactly what players have been wanting. That's because Apex Legends has just broken its record for concurrent players on Steam with the launch of Season 13.
Apex Legends has, admittedly, been on a tear in 2022. Season 12 launched on February 8 and demolished the battle royale's previous record for concurrent players on Steam. The record jumped from over 330,000 concurrent players to over 390,000. Season 13's launch has taken Apex Legends one step further. While it's not as huge of a jump as Season 12 was, it did break the previous record by achieving an impressive total of over 410,000 concurrent players.
The record on Steam was broken on Wednesday, May 11. That momentum was carried over to Thursday which also put up an impressive number, totaling over 393,000. Apex Legends may even break the record again with the weekend approaching, as Steam's userbase tends to spike on both Saturday and Sunday. But even if the cap for the current season ends up being 410,000 players, Respawn should consider it an incredible achievement and just the latest in a string of impressive steps forward.
While the record itself is impressive, what's even more exciting for Respawn Entertainment is that Apex Legends has continued to grow -- at least on PC -- since it launched in 2019. Apex Legends only arrived on Steam in late 2020, so its earlier numbers aren't available. At the time, though, Apex Legends was down to just 110,000 players. By February 2021, Apex Legends had climbed up to 190,000, followed by a massive surge on Steam up to 330,000 in May.
Another way in which Apex Legends is gaining momentum is in content creation. Apex Legends is in the process of overtaking Fortnite as the most-viewed battle royale across streaming services like Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube. That's certainly helping bring up player numbers.
Respawn has no plans to let Apex Legends' momentum end here, either. The mobile version of Apex Legends is planned to release later this month, potentially bringing the battle royal to millions more players than ever before. And Apex Legends as it is right now is only going to get more and more content, too. Respawn is only just getting started.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a mobile release arriving on May 17.