EA’s Fortnite copycat is off to a flier

One week after Electronic Arts launched Apex Legends, a free-to-play online battle royale game, the team is purring over 25 million sign ups and over 2 million concurrent players at peak times.

The game itself, developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by EA, is nothing that original. While the look of the game might have a different feel to Fortnite, the idea and gameplay is effectively the same and users are seemingly loving it. Just a point of comparison, it took Fortnite three months to hit the 25 million sign-up milestone.

“What a week,” said Vince Zampella of Respawn Entertainment. “Since we launched Apex Legends last week on Monday we’ve seen the creation of an Apex Legends community that is excited, thriving, and full of great feedback and ideas. Our goal is to build this game with you, our community, so keep giving us your feedback because we really are listening.”

Gaming might well be a niche in the telecommunications world right now, but it is growing at a staggering rate. It won’t be too long before the telcos have to pay attention to this segment of the digital world, factoring in gaming as a major conversation in the connectivity mix.

What Fortnite has done over the last couple of months is take a niche segment of the gaming world out to the masses. Online multiplayer formats are of course not new, but the free-to-play idea, with revenues being sourced entirely through in-game purchases, has been taken to a new level. The accessibility of a relatively limited experience has captured the imagination and interest of new users, opening the door for other developers to follow.

Of course, as the popularity of these games increase, the demands on the network will do as well. These are games which are reliant on real-time experiences, marrying interactions between users all over the world. For avid gamers, or those with children, purchasing decisions might well be impacted on the performance of these experiences. Now it might not seem like a massive deal, but these trends have a tendency to snowball; just look at the explosion of video content over the last couple of years.

It’s just another factor for the telcos to consider over the coming years. Gone are the days where gamers are satisfied with a linear, story-mode experience, something which would have been easy for the telcos to deal with. These games require downloads and updates, but this is nothing compared to the demand of real-time interactions with 20+ other users in countries all over the world.

Gaming has largely been ignored to date, but with the segment creeping out of its niche corner offering new and in-depth experiences for the mass market, it is increasingly becoming a burden on the network.