Apex Legends finally ends downward spiral as Season 24 revives player count

Apex Legends has had a huge turnaround off the back of Season 24’s launch, with the game receiving an influx of players the likes of which we haven’t seen for months.

Respawn’s Battle Royale hit its peak in February 2023, with hype for the game reaching an all-time high. From there, it’s been a continual downward spiral, with the game bleeding over 3/4s of its active concurrent player count. Apex is still popular in the grand scheme of things, but much less so than before.

However, Season 24 marks the first big turnaround. Seasons had progressively lower and lower player count peaks, struggling to hit 100k players on Steam daily even when massive new updates launched.

Now, Season 24’s launch has marked the first time Apex Legends has had over 200k players on Steam in a long while.

Apex Legends Season 24 has massive surge of players

We spoke with ImperialHal and iiTzTimmy about the state of Apex Legends late in 2024, and they both agreed that huge changes to Apex that gave players more power are exactly what the game needs.

And, while Hal himself isn’t entirely thrilled with the direction in which the game has gone for Season 24, he was absolutely correct in that big changes were needed. Not everyone has received these adjustments well, but the objective truth is that this content update has been a huge hit for Apex.

A look at this graph from Steamcharts reveals that this is the highest player count Apex Legends has had in months, bringing an end to the game’s continual downward spiral that hadn’t been stopped since its 2023 peak. Every season has had progressively lower and lower peak player counts.

And, while 223,241 is a fraction of Apex’s 624,473 peak on Steam, it’s still a massive improvement over prior seasons that saw a slight boost followed by a continual and unending decline.

What’s more, that player count has been holding steady so far. Apex still has a long ways to go in order to return to its former glory, but Season 24 is the first step in a positive direction we’ve seen in months if we’re talking in terms of player counts.