Apex Legends popularity takes a big dip on Twitch as Season 13 hype slows

Apex Legends has just endured one of its biggest dips in viewership on Twitch for single month, with June representing a near-40% decline compared to May – but why has this big drop-off occurred?

At the start of May, the new Season, the 13th in the game’s three-year history, was launched and brought fresh hype once again. Although exact player counts for Apex Legends aren’t revealed, one method of measuring this hype is through Twitch viewership.

In May, average concurrent viewership jumped to 109,000, a slight increase from 92,000 the month before. However, in June, viewership has dropped down to only 69,000 – a 38% decline.

This has also led to a sharp decrease in hours watched, dropping from 81 million to only 50 million – the lowest hours watched since December 2021.

Why has Apex Twitch viewership dropped?

Streamers have been noticing this decline too, with SoaR streamer Draynilla telling his fellow content creators not to be discouraged if they have seen a drop in numbers.

But, it’s not common for the second month of a new season to take such a drastic hit to Twitch stats, so what could be behind the change? Although some might suggest that Twitch overall might be down in the summer months, Twitch’s total average viewership remained the exact same as the previous month, at just over 2.5 million.

Rival games like Valorant (+1.5%), Fortnite (-5.6%) and Warzone (-8.1%) only saw small fluctuations to their viewership, compared to Apex’s -38.9%, via SullyGnome.

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So we can assume that the issue is on Apex’s end, rather than any external factors. Part of the reason could be the big change to Ranked in the new season, which has pushed some streamers away from playing it so much. Total streamers for Apex dropped by 13%, and hours streamed dropped by 20%.

Apex’s gameplay has also faced a number of challenges in Season 13, most notably the input lag on Xbox consoles, which has made it nearly unplayable for many on that console.

To compound this issue, complaints about faulty hit registration have been rife this season, which may have led to a decrease in players overall, thus making people less interested in watching the game too.

Whatever the cause, Respawn Entertainment will be hoping that whatever they have cooked up for the next in-game event, followed by Season 14 in August, will be enough to rekindle the interest. And it’s important to remember that Apex is still an immensely popular game, even if it has taken a dip.

The ALGS Championship also begins on July 7, and there are likely to be rewards for watching the event on Twitch, which should boost viewership again.