Apex Legends tops 198,000 concurrent players on Steam

Respawn’s free-to-play battle royale title Apex Legends has hit a new concurrent user record on Steam, proving it's still a very popular title.

Apex Legends was released on Valve’s storefront back on November 5, 2020, and since then it's been a pretty popular and enduring PvP game.

Even by November 10, we saw the game claim the accolade of fourth-highest concurrent player count on Steam – an impressive feat for a game that had been on the storefront for only five days.

Now, though, the game has hit an impressive 198,235 simultaneous players on Steam. The peak was achieved on Saturday and is the game's highest ever concurrent user peak according to SteamDB (via Dexerto).

That means even the stalwart popular titles that live at the top of the Steam player charts – GTA 5, Rainbow Six Siege, and so on – are less popular than Respawn's battle royale this weekend. The current Two-Year Anniversary Collection event is clearly drawing more players than ever to the game, though Apex Legends still has a long way to go until it hits the dizzying heights of PUBG's peak of 3,236,027 concurrent players.

Apex Legends Season 8 is clearly a popular Season of the game, then, and some of that may be down to the resurgence of Caustic in the meta (even though Respawn is thinking about making some changes to him in Season 9).

Thanks to various on-going lockdowns, spates of bad weather and more, Steam has been seeing a boom in popularity lately. Steam has more monthly active users than both Xbox and PlayStation, and Steam smashed its own record at the start of the year when it logged a whopping 25,416,720 online concurrent users.