The players of Apex Legends are pretty enthusiastic about their game of choice, especially when they aren’t planning a strike over issues with it or complaining about exploits that make Gibraltar an unstoppable bubble machine.
So, naturally, when it was discovered that the game had broken its all-time record number of concurrent players, according to data from SteamDB, many of these players rushed to celebrate the milestone.
However, buried deep in a Reddit thread full of gleeful Apexers, an interesting explanation for the sudden spike can be found.
Apex is riding a high, but the origin of it might surprise you
Posting to begin the thread in question in the Apex Legends subreddit, user PikAtChuHuN shared an image of the game’s SteamDB page, showing off a new record peak of 468,603 concurrent players, which subsequently rose to 511,676 later in the same day, captioning it: “Apex Legends just hit its all-time peak today on Steam since release.”
The Apex community responded to this news with a mixture of joy and disbelief, with user wera125 exclaiming: “Jesus Christ, the previous one was 330k or something like that”, leading Gcarsk to point out that the number had been high enough to put Apex at number eight on SteamDB’s list of the top ten highest concurrent player counts ever recorded, which is headlined by the likes of PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds and CS:GO.
Some users had a guess at the reasons for the sudden increase, with DaveLevv saying: “hopefully there's a good (section) of new players like myself. I started ten days ago and I've just been getting farmed every game” and LetsGetHIvern adding: “Two words. Kings Canyon.”
However, users snapple_man and nodiso both offered a different reason for the random increase, citing issues with the game’s Origin client forcing them to play it via Steam instead.
The existence of this testimony rather scuppers the arguments of some other users, who racked up the likes by suggesting that the peak was evidence that the “no Apex August” initiative, a name for the aforementioned strike proposed by some frustrated players back in June, had had the opposite effect than it intended.
Amusingly, some players in the thread were actually there to highlight issues, with user da_fishy saying: “you’re telling me there’s 468k concurrent players and somehow they can’t manage to keep predators out of platinum lobbies?”
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