A new season has dropped, shocked, and rocked in Apex Legends, sending the player count soaring and setting a brand-new Steam concurrent player count record for Respawn's fan-favorite battle royale.
As recorded by Steam Charts - a handy website that keeps a running tally on all the stats and science-y bits on Valve's Steam platform - Apex Legends set an all-new concurrent peak of over half a million Legends the day after the new season launched: 510,286 to be precise.
That means it now joins the likes of PUBG: Battlegrounds, Lost Ark, CS:GO, Dota 2, Elden Ring, New World, and Cyberpunk 2077 as one of only a handful of games to have ever broken the half-million milestone on Steam.
Apex Legends has hit a new all-time peak player count on Steam after the Season 14 launch!Over 500,000 concurrent players for the first time ever (Steam only) 📈Alive game 👍 pic.twitter.com/KL3k0YBEp2August 10, 2022
Of course, Steam represents just a fraction of the players enjoying the new season - Apex Legends is available on most main platforms, including EA's own Origin client (which, ironically enough, had problems on Season 14's launch day) - but Steam concurrent counts, whilst not perfect, are a good way of measuring a game's current popularity. Not bad for a three-year-old game, eh?
Apex Legends Season 14 launched on August 9, but PC players using the Origin client had trouble downloading the update. That meant that they couldn't drop into the new season and enjoy Vantage, the brand-new Legend, or the major updates to OG map, Kings Canyon.
An hour after its launch, Respawn tweeted to say that it was "aware of an issue preventing players from installing the [Apex Legends] update through Origin and are actively investigating". Things should hopefully be okay for Origin-playing Legends now, though.
Want to know more about Apex Legends Season 14? GamesRadar+ spoke with several members of the Apex team about the changes coming with Season 14, the new design philosophy, and their goal of making Apex Legends "a forever game, the game you will teach your kids how to play," as senior design director Evan Nikolich told us.
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