So we’ve come a long way from the explosive launch of the newest major battle royale title, Apex Legends. Since the launch of the new shooter, millions of gamers have been blasting their way through the games maps and jumping around like a bunch of lunatics. The game is really fun and interesting to play, but there’s a major problem brewing.
Speaking on the prospect of the future for Apex Legends, popular streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek has made statements that cast some pretty major doubts on the long-term state of the game. Shroud is an incredibly popular and prolific streamer, and many point to his influence as a major source of early promotion for Apex. So if he abandons the game, it could spell trouble. He cites issues with stability, and especially a lack of new content, as primary reasons for moving on to newer titles. The anemic content schedule for the Battle Pass system is also being tagged by many as a motivation for abandoning the game.
I actually stopped playing right after they released the first battle pass. I had already got all the achievements and was hoping for something else to work towards. Unfortunately, the pass…wasn’t cost friendly. It felt like the devs were only focused on money. I mean…after you reached a certain level, you stopped getting loot boxes outside of the battle pass.
But setting aside more personal opinions from figureheads, even a casual glance at the Twitch viewership for the title shows signs of trouble stirring on the horizon. For the last few weeks, Apex Legends has hovered around the 10th spot in terms of top viewers on the streaming platform, with a constant drop in viewers over the last 90 days.
According to TwitchTracker statistics, Apex Legends sits at around 50,000 live viewers at the time of writing, a far cry from the peak average of over 200,000 viewers across all channels. The game launched in February with nearly 20,000 channels streaming the game, now that number has fallen to less than 5,000. Suffice to say, but things aren’t looking good for Respawn if they don’t manage to right the ship so to speak.
And considering that popular streamers make up the biggest share of viewership for the game, the loss of names like Shroud or DrDisrespect could spell doom for popularity for the title.
You might be wondering how the once massively popular shooter could have dropped off so hard, well the answer is actually pretty simple. As EA and Respawn continue a somewhat glacial pace for updates, more and more streamers and general gamers will be moving on to other games. Many streamers saw the writing on the wall with Fortnite, and understood that getting trapped into making content for one popular game is a death sentence for their enjoyment of that game. As such, it seems pretty clear that EA and Respawn need to get some new content out the door for Apex Legends if they hope to continue competing with the established titans of the genre.
