Apex Legends, a free-to-play battle royale video game created by the developers of Titanfall, has passed 50 million players a few hours ago. It is no exaggeration to state that the game has exploded in the player base as soon as Respawn, the company that developed the game released the game.

In only the first week of release, the number of players spiked up to 25 million players, states Electronic Arts, the parent company of Respawn. Not only that, according to Respawn CEO Vince Zampella, the game recorded “well over 2 million” concurrent players on the first weekend.

The amazing part about the rise of Apex Legends is the lack of hype that surrounded the game before its release. Popular games such as Fortnite and Overwatch were advertised and broadcasted constantly throughout media in order to gain publicity. Apex Legends, on the other hand, had minimum amounts of advertisements compared to many other popular games.

Apex Legends was released in an already over-saturated battle royale game concept in the gaming industry. Typically, games that are released in an overly saturated gaming industry do not fare well. Heroes of the Storm in MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), Battlerite Royale in battle royale and Paladins are prime examples of games that have “joined the party too late.” However, in the case of Apex Legends, releasing the game in the later stages of the trend may be the very reason why the game was able to succeed.

“Since the game has been in development for a while, the developers of the game learned from other battle royale games’ mistakes,” said Feige Wang, a Junior who plays the game passionately, “Not only is it free for accessibility, unlike the few battle royale games that are not, Apex Legends mixed in the hero system, a popular concept that has been proven to be successful in Overwatch, League of Legends and other games. PUBG and Fortnite do not have them.”

Apex Legends indeed fixed various amounts of issues that many players in other battle royale games complained about. This included the ping system for clearer communications between teammates and much easier ways of skydiving to the battleground. In each match, the players either play with two other friends or are matched with two other random players.

These fixes allow the game to be more reliant on coordination and teamwork for each squad. Each “legends” have their unique abilities and styles of play which further increase the depth of strategies and ways of winning. By fixing the issues of past battle royale games as well as adding newer elements to the battle royale helped the game immensely to reach this state of popularity. Apex Legends also already had mature players from their prior games such as Titanfall which allowed a better start than most other battle royale games.

As the graph reveals, there were ten million players only in the first three days since its release in the fourth of February, 2019 and 25 million players in the first week. As a reference,  Fortnite, another extremely popular video game, took 41 days to achieve the same feat.

“Simply put: Comparing the two games is relatively straightforward, and EA’s Apex Legends is already off to a stronger start than the biggest gaming phenomenon since Minecraft,” stated Ben Gilbert, a senior tech correspondent based in New York City.

The staffs of Respawn look forward to even more players joining them to help develop and improve the game. They also plan on entering the Esports side of gaming to hopefully reach bigger achievements.

“Since we launched Apex Legends last week on Monday we’ve seen the creation of an Apex Legends community that is excited, thriving, and full of great feedback and ideas. Our goal is to build this game with you, our community, so keep giving us your feedback because we really are listening,”   remarked Zampella, on the milestone of reaching such incredible amounts of players.