EA share price plummets because of Apex Legends Season 2 say analysts
EAFans of Apex Legends have been enjoying the launch of Season 2, but it hasn’t been all good news for publisher EA, as share prices dropped more than 5% in spite of, or perhaps because of, the new season.
Players waited a long time for the launch of Season 2 after over a month’s delay, and while it was able to deliver what they wanted, it appears it wasn’t enough to impress investors as EA’s share price dropped to its lowest point in five months.
Apex Legends exploded in popularity out of the gate but hasn’t been able to capture that lightning in a bottle since.
Twitch viewership is way down
In a report by CNBC, it’s suggested that the plummeting Twitch viewership is one reason the share prices have taken a hit. After consistently being around 100,000 concurrent viewers, the game now finds itself at a much more modest 20,000-30,000 viewer count on average.
- Read More: Fortnite – but that growth has undoubtedly slowed.
However, Michael ‘shroud‘ Grezsiek has been one of the very big streamers that have consistently been streaming Apex since its launch of Season 2.
It’s almost guaranteed that Dr Disrespect would’ve spent time on the game if not for his ban from Twitch as a result of his E3 IRL stream. When he makes his return, we’ll have to see if he decides to stream Apex or something else.
Player engagement is still going well
Analyst Jeff Cohen said EA’s share price dropping like this is “pretty drastic and definitely feels oversold,” according to CNBC.
Cohen does say the engagement of Apex Legends on Reddit and the number of Twitch channels streaming the game are still encouraging.
Would cross-play help?
An investment advisor at Gerber Kawasaki Inc says a move to cross-platform will help Apex Legends bounce back, according to Bloomberg.
“A lot of people were expecting this season to kind of blow them out the water,” Nick Licouris, an investment adviser covering video games at Gerber Kawasaki Inc said to Bloomberg.. “I wasn’t too impressed” and EA really needs Apex Legends to be cross-platform in order to take to it to the next level. “That was one great thing that Fortnite did.”
According to Business Insider, the update failed to ease concerns over Apex’s potential to compete with Fortnite.
For what it’s worth, Activision and Take-Two, two of EA’s competitors, fell 3.4% and 1.9% respectively so it might not be all on Apex Legends.
Stocks fluctuating is no surprise to see and if Apex Legends continues to perform well going forward, we can expect to see the stocks bounce back.