Apex Legends stream views have reportedly dropped by 75% in a month.
The news, reported by PC Gamer, comes after Apex had one of the strongest starts possible for a video game launch. Within its first week over 25 million players had given the free-to-play battle royale a spin, and Respawn Entertainment was over the moon with the reception.
However, Fortnite experienced a temporary blip in view count when Apex Legends launched (and everyone was trying it out), but it quickly bounced back to above 20m and has remained stable ever since, reports PC Gamer.
Recent information from stats website TwitchMetrics [via Dexerto] showed that streams of the game are now just managing to average 50,000 viewers.
This seems like a pretty big number on its own, but compare it to the average viewership of the game at launch.
Back then Apex was sitting at around 300,000 viewers on average, and even sometimes saw twice as many viewers as Fortnite.
One of the reasons as to why players are logging out of Apex is the lag problem.
Lots of players have been complaining about slow servers and serious lag issues. Even top Apex player/Twitch star Shroud has struggled with Respawn’s game.
Over on Twitter, players have been sounding off about the issues within Apex Legends.
One user tweeted: “I officially quit @PlayApex until the lag is fixed, the audio is fixed and either better team play or solos is added. I just lagged while trying to save my teammates and they ended up leaving after I got their banners.”
Hopefully Respawn entertainment will be getting something sorted for its servers sooner rather than later, but at this point you have to ask: is battle royale simply dying out?
Battle royale behemoths Fortnite and PUBG have also experienced a loss of players and Twitch viewers over the last few months, and with every game under the sun now having a battle royale mode, you have to wonder if we’ve hit the end of the line.