Apex Legends is having a big week. With the launch of Season 9, a new legend and a new 3v3 Arenas mode, so many players tried to jump in yesterday that the servers couldn't handle the strain. While Apex's servers are still having intermittent issues, that hasn't stopped the game from blowing past its player record on Steam, likely making this Apex Legends' most successful week ever.
Apex Legends first launched on Steam in November 2020 and typically held steady around 100,000 concurrent players. That's a healthy playerbase, though small compared to Steam's heaviest hitters like PUBG and CS:GO, which often had more than 400,000 and 900,000 players, respectively, according to SteamDB. But Apex is on the rise: on Wednesday it set a record for its all-time peak players with 313,839. That concurrent count would likely be higher if it weren't for the ongoing server issues, which are making the numbers a bit erratic.
Our "current players" charts still sort of look like an ongoing cardiac arrest but by God we're setting records on Apex Legends today pic.twitter.com/isALQ8tLLMMay 5, 2021
Apex Legends is also available on Origin and consoles, none of which offer public player figures. But Steam probably isn't the only platform seeing excitement over this new season—if Arenas proves to be a hit, Apex's Steam record may become its new normal.
