Apex Legends breaks through 10 million players as concurrent numbers reach a million

Only a few days have passed since Respawn Entertainment surprise launched Apex Legends, a new battle royale first-person shooter set in the Titanfall universe. The game managed to gather up a million players just eight hours after launch, and that number has exploded since then.

Respawn CEO Vince Zampella announced today in a blog post that 10 million unique players have now played Apex Legends in the 72 hours it has been live. The game's concurrent player number was also shared, which is now at an impressive one million players. Considering the game launched on a Monday, there's a fairly good chance of another major boost to the player numbers as we reach the weekend.

Thanking the community for the successful launch, Zampella added in the blog post:

"This has been a truly incredible journey. We tested and tweaked. We argued and agreed. We got to a point where we felt some magic. We knew it would be risky to take the franchise in this direction, to go free to play, and do a surprise launch. But we fell in love with Apex Legends and wanted, needed, other people to play it too.

We hoped you’d love it as much as us, but never in our wildest dreams could we have expected the outpouring of support and positivity we’ve seen. From all of us at Respawn, thank you for giving us and Apex Legends a chance. Thank you for joining us on this journey. This is just the beginning! We have so much more in store for you this year."

There's no telling how the player numbers will fare in the coming weeks, but the game has a solid base to build from. For comparison, the free-to-play battle royale behemoth Fortnite, managed to hit 30 million registered players just around two months after launch, but its concurrent number at the time was at 1.3 million.

Apex Legends is available as a free-to-play title on PC via Origin, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.