The newest season of Apex Legends launched on February 8. Defiance brings with it an exciting new mode, Control, which pits two teams of nine Legends against each other as they struggle to capture and hold strategic points on the Apex map. Along with a new map and the intense Mad Maggie, the game is seeing a resurgence of players excited to experience this new heap of content.
Apex Legends managed to reach a concurrent player count of 392,996 on Steam alone–prior to the release of Season 12, the highest count was 330,879. Other platforms are not as open with player counts the same way Steam is, so this impressive number does not include Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, or Origin players.
Last year, over 28 million new players jumped into Apex Legends, bringing the total to around 128 million worldwide. According to EA, active players in Apex have increased by 30 percent when compared to last year.
Last week, Respawn teased an upcoming upgrade for the game that would increase its performance on current-gen consoles. It’s unknown when Apex will be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
While the title is getting plenty of praise from players, Apex Legends isn’t free from controversy. Earlier this month, the title introduced new cosmetics to celebrate its anniversary, with the Bloodhound skin costing a whopping $164. Many feel that EA cares more about pleasing streamers and professional players, with one Reddit user saying “Respawn decided that giving us heirloom shards wouldn’t make them enough money and replaced them with a very well-made skin for the pro-streamers and creators who can afford it.”
Apex Legends is available to download on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The game was the second most Tweeted about game of 2021, just behind Genshin Impact. Apex Legends will launch on mobile devices sometime this year, with a soft launch coming to select countries to start.
