Apex Legends is crushing its concurrent player count record on Steam

News
By published

Season 9 has more people playing Apex Legends than ever.

Apex Legends Season 9 Legacy Arenas
(Image credit: Respawn Entertainment)

Apex Legends is having a big week. With the launch of Season 9, a new legend and a new 3v3 Arenas mode, so many players tried to jump in yesterday that the servers couldn't handle the strain. While Apex's servers are still having intermittent issues, that hasn't stopped the game from blowing past its player record on Steam, likely making this Apex Legends' most successful week ever.

Apex Legends first launched on Steam in November 2020 and typically held steady around 100,000 concurrent players. That's a healthy playerbase, though small compared to Steam's heaviest hitters like PUBG and CS:GO, which often had more than 400,000 and 900,000 players, respectively, according to SteamDB. But Apex is on the rise: on Wednesday it set a record for its all-time peak players with 313,839. That concurrent count would likely be higher if it weren't for the ongoing server issues, which are making the numbers a bit erratic.

Apex Legends is also available on Origin and consoles, none of which offer public player figures. But Steam probably isn't the only platform seeing excitement over this new season—if Arenas proves to be a hit, Apex's Steam record may become its new normal.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).