I imagine the champagne corks are popping over at Respawn Entertainment right about now. We already knew that Apex Legends was a huge hit, having picked up a whopping 50 million strong player count one month after release. While that’s obviously good news, Apex is an F2P title, so the real barometer of success comes on how much people are choosing to spend on the game.
These figures are notoriously difficult to discover, generally being in-house secrets and with the companies under no obligations to publicize them. But Super Data thinks it’s got a way around this, and they’re estimating that the game made an exceptional $92 million in February, the best launch month of any F2P release in history.
Now, there are a couple of caveats here. Super Data claims that they arrive at their figures through “proprietary data partnerships [through which] we collect point-of-sale and event data from publishers, developers, and payment service providers.” Without knowing exactly how this works though, we’re just going to have to take them at their word.
But while Apex Legends has done very well, it’s not top of the heap just yet. More lucrative on PC are Dungeon Fighter Online, League of Legends, Fantasy Westward Journey II, Crossfire and *drumroll* Fortnite, and on console it’s pipped by FIFA 19, Fortnite and Anthem. However, a couple of things should be kept in mind.
Firstly, both FIFA 19 and Anthem are premium full-price titles, so they’ve instantly got a leg up on the competition. Secondly, this is only the debut month of Apex Legends that we’re talking about, in which players will be learning the ropes before they make a financial commitment.
As such, it’ll be very interesting to see how Apex Legends does when the March charts are out, especially considering the first Battle Pass has now launched (as barebones as it was). Here’s hoping Respawn’s surprise hit can make it to the top of the charts once more.
