Record Number of 300,000 Apex Legends Players at Season 9 Launch
The start of Season 9 in Apex Legends translated into server problems on all platforms. Indeed, the Legacy patch attracted a record number of players and enabled the game to set a new record on Steam.
May 4 brought with it the launch of Season 9 in Apex Legends. Apparently, a large list of changes in the accompanying update encouraged many - or even too many - people to play Respawn Entertainment's game. Apex Legends' servers couldn't handle the onslaught of people eager to check out Legacy and the players had trouble joining the game. Also today, the game's network infrastructure caved in under the pressure of the crowd of interested parties (vide Down Detector and Reddit).
Leaving aside the usual complaints and more or less desperate memes, the interest in Legacy translated into a huge increase in the game's popularity. At least, that's what Steam stats indicate, because on the website Apex Legendsbroke its own activity record several times over. At the peak moment, nearly 314,000 users were in the game simultaneously (via SteamDB). Today, a day after the launch of Season 9, Apex Legends still holds the 3rd place on the list of the most popular games on Steam.
The title is doing equally well on Twitch, being the fourth position (or third, if we exclude the Just Chatting category) with the largest number of viewers at the time of writing this text. Of course, this is little consolation for those who can't join in the fun themselves. The team at Respawn Entertainment assures that they are working on a resolving the problem.
