Apex Legends recently released their 18th seasonal update for the game, including a completely revamped Legend, balance updates, and changes to the ranked system. Seasonal updates are a great tool for developers to keep gameplay fresh and help revitalise their game’s community, retaining players and keeping them interested.
Season 18 of Apex Legends launched on August 8th at 6 PM GMT and immediately saw an uptick in player count. According to the Steam Database, in the upcoming days to the 18th seasonal update player count was peaking anywhere between 320,000-300,000 players. On the 8th of August, after the new update, player count reached a recent high of 450,000. Although it's a healthy boost for the game’s ecosystem, it doesn’t match up to the peak of 586K players after the Season 17 update.
Here we’ll take a look at how the Season 18 update performed in terms of viewership on Twitch, and how this update compares to the one that came before it.
Apex Legends Season 18 Viewership
Apex Legends’ new seasonal release has given it a healthy boost in viewership compared to its standard. For the debut of Season 18, Apex Legends received 2.83M hours of watch time on Twitch alone. The boost to watch time ranks the Battle Royale game within the top-10 most-watched games on Twitch for this week, a boost for a game that is ranked 13th on Twitch globally by Streams Charts composite monthly index.
Most watched games on Twitch during the debut of Apex Legends Season 18
Peak concurrent viewers reached a height of 140K for Apex Legends, which is a sizeable increase compared to the game’s normal viewership metrics. The average viewers figure of 60.2K is also almost double what the game has been usually expected to garner in recent months. Although these figures are an increase from the norm, they’re not as much of an increase as the game received last season.
For Season 17, Apex Legends received 3.11M Hours Watched for the update’s debut on Twitch, meaning Season 18 was met with a 7% drop in watch time. Peak Viewers also reached a higher peak of 174.6K and Average Viewers was about 5K higher last season. Does this drop in watch time on Twitch mean that the game is losing attention and starting to fade out of the mainstream spotlight? Not exactly.
Interestingly, the only figure to increase when comparing Season 18 to the previous one, is the Peak Channels metric. 8.6K channels went live during the debut of the new season to stream and try it out, a six per cent increase compared to last season’s Peak Channels. As mentioned, Apex Legends is currently ranked as one of the top-10 most-watched games on Twitch, but due to the high number of channels live in the category, viewership is comparatively diluted when compared to a category like CS:GO or Just Chatting.
Apex Legends is a hugely popular game both within streaming and competitive esports play, but the Twitch category for the game is suffering from a potential oversaturation of the streaming market. In terms of Peak Channels for the last seven days, Apex is second only to Fortnite, the Battle Royale game which took over the planet. Whilst the oversaturation of channels on Twitch covering Apex Legends might be problematic for the live-streaming community, people may also be suffering from Apex Legends burn-out.
Apex Legends as an esports title has been sent into the stratosphere in popularity recently. The 2022 Championship event drew in over 11M hours of watch time and was one of the most-watched events of the year, setting a record in watch time for the discipline. The recent Split 2 Playoffs event, which took place last month, became the most popular event of the year, almost dethroning the Championship of last year. The event received 10.6M hours of watch time and a peak concurrent viewers of 581K was achieved.
Looking at our page for Apex Legends, it’s clear to see in the viewership dynamics that this was one of the most-watched events in Apex Legends’ history and one of the true spikes in viewership. Apex Legends earns its peaks in raw viewership through its esports events, not its seasonal updates. With the Split 2 Playoffs barely behind us and the 2023 Championship less than a month away, it might just be that players need a break from Apex Legends to refresh themselves and hype themselves up for the upcoming ultimate event.
Season 18 might have seen a drop in viewership for the Battle Royale title, but more people streamed the game on Twitch than ever before this year. This year’s 8.6K Peak Channels are the most channels to stream the game concurrently since August of last year. On top of this, the esports ecosystem for Apex Legends is healthy and bringing in huge viewership for the title, with records and expectations set to potentially be smashed this year at the 2023 Championship event.