On October 31, Apex Legends launched their 19th season which will run until February 13. The brand-new season of content is titled Ignite and brought a new Legend into the fray: Conduit. Despite the new content for the game, viewership and attention for the title are continuing to decline on a seasonal basis for the Battle Royale title.
The release of Season 16 earlier this year helped Apex Legends achieve its highest player count on Steam since released on the platform in late 2020. The title reached 624K Peak Players according to the Steam Database, and the release of Season 17 a few months later achieved 585K Peak Players.
The player base of Apex Legends is shrinking according to the Steam data, and Season 19’s release only managed 436K Peak Players. This is roughly comparable to the player base size of the title during Season 13, a year and a half ago. Although the game is still one of the top-10 top sellers on the Steam store, both viewership and player base are falling.
Release trailer for Season 19 of Apex Legends
While the reaction of players to the new Legend Conduit has been positive, not everyone was happy with the new season. Some players criticised the new season for featuring recoloured versions of past battle pass skins; some of these recycled cosmetic items cost more than $10 to purchase.
Many players have taken issue with the new changes to the in-game Ranked system, which now features “Promotional Trials”: special challenges players will have to complete to progress to the next rank tier. Many players have been vocal that these trials are extremely difficult when playing alone, and that the new changes are punishing to players who are not queued up with friends.
Apex Legends Season 19 Release Viewership
Apex Legends’ new Season 19 has given the game a healthy boost in viewership, as the new content and Legend give streamers a reason to check out the title once again. Looking at the most-watched games on Twitch in the three days after the initial release of the new season, Apex Legends is the 7th-most-watched game on Twitch with 4.13M Hours Watched.
The release of the new season gave the Battle Royale title a 68% boost in watch time compared to the three days before release, and in those three days before release, Apex Legends ranked 13th by watch time on Twitch. Apex Legends is currently the most-watched Battle Royale game on Twitch, having earned 200K Hours Watched more than its next-best competitor, Fortnite.
Apex Legends received 123.7K Peak Viewers in the same period, a 40% increase for the game. Although the new season gave the game a solid boost in viewership, it was not able to rank within the top 10 on Twitch in this metric. It can be hard to visualize what these metrics exactly mean for the title, so how does it compare to the viewership of the previous season’s release?
Unfortunately for Apex Legends, data for Season 19’s release represent a decline in viewership on Twitch. Comparing the release days of Season 18 and 19, Twitch viewership data show a decrease in all major metrics. Season 19 achieved 2.44M Hours Watched on the first day of release, a 15% decrease compared to what Season 18 was able to garner.
Across both Peak Viewers and Average Viewers, viewership for the title has dropped more than 10%. Compared to Season 17, which achieved 174.6K PV and 69.5K AV on release day, the decline in viewership is even more drastic. This isn’t something new for the game, as Season 18’s release also exhibited a decline in viewership compared to the previous event.
The one saving grace for Season 18 was that the Peak Channels metric increased by 6% compared to the 17th iteration. Although viewership was down for the game, the Peak Channels figure showed that streamers both established and amateur were excited for the new content released for the title. For Season 19’s release, Peak Channels dropped by over 28%, showing a lack of interest in the live-streaming community on Twitch to cover the new content.
With fewer and fewer streamers interested in covering the release of the new Apex Legends content, which streamers were the most-watched of the Season 19 release?
In the three days following the release of the new season, TSM_ImperialHal reigned supreme with 387K Hours Watched. The ALGS 2023 Champion is hugely popular in the live-streaming community of Apex Legends, and his esports prowess only draws more viewers to his stream. Viewers were clearly interested in the reaction of the world champion to the new content, and his release day coverage of the season was one of his most-watched streams of late.
In second place was Japanese streamer 加藤純一です. The Japanese creator is generally hugely popular within Japanese live-streaming circles, but his coverage of the release was one of his more popular streams of the month. Highlighting his popularity, he earned his second place in these rankings with by far the lowest broadcasting time of any streamer here: less than 8 hours.
Japanese viewership is critical for Apex Legends, and as Esports Charts reported, Japanese-language viewership was accountable for over 25% of all watch time at the ALGS 2023 Championship. It’s no wonder that numerous Japanese live-streaming content creators rank highly within this list.
HisWattson was the third-most-watched streamer of release, achieving 237K Hours Watched. The American streamer is hugely dedicated to the game and recorded over 35 hours of Airtime in three days. He is well-known in the community thanks to his high ranking in the Ranked ladders of the title, and his coverage of the season’s debut was his most popular content in the last three months.
Apex Legends is still riding the high of the new Season 19 release, and viewership is elevated compared to October. However, October was the weakest month of 2023 for Apex Legends viewership, and the game brought in an average of 814K Hours Watched on a daily basis. This was the first time since 2020 that the game failed to bring in an average of 1M+ HW a day throughout a month.
The new Season of content has revitalised the viewership, bringing it up to 1.3M HW a day for the first couple of days in November, but it's unclear how long this will stay the case. 2023 has seen Apex Legends slowly lose both viewers and streamers on Twitch, and it seems the game needs some drastic changes to turn itself around. PRO subscribers can explore the full history of Apex Legends’ viewership in 2023 on the game’s statistics page.
