The rise and fall of Apex Legends on Twitch: the same reason

The main art: Ramzy Kamen 

The loudest release in the Twitch history, the fastest million online and 50 million players in a month - the story of Apex Legends, the heir to the Titanfall series, began this way. The first two weeks of the Battle Royale from Respawn Entertainment were watched for 30 million hours, but the streamers are now returning to the games “where they came from”.

Apex Legends was the first game that scored 31.7 million hours of viewing on Twitch in a week. Only Dota 2 could overcome the 30 million hours mark during The International 2019.

However, the number of viewers began to decline steadily: the game failed to score even 10 million hours last week.

The decline in the audience is directly related to streamers: Electronic Arts relied precisely on opinion leaders in their marketing campaign. Namely:

• Michael "shroud" Grzesiek (average 94 thousand viewers for 104 hours online, maximum online 211 thousand viewers and total viewing time - 9.1 million hours)
• Tyler "Ninja" Blevins (3.7 million hours, average online 46 thousand viewers)
• Herschel "Dr Disrespect" Beahm (2.8 million viewing hours)
• Jaryd Russell "summit1g" Lazar (2.6 million viewing hours)
• Timothy John "TimTheTatman" Betar (2.1 million viewing hours)

What's up?

Just look at the top streamers to understand the problem of the game. The most popular Apex Legends streamer over the past seven days was Kobe "Dizzy" Meadows. His broadcasts lasted a total of 31 hours with an average online of 17 thousand viewers. It is worthy, but not even close to the top streamers’ results in the first week of the game.

Shroud is the second most popular. Although he played only 9 hours because of a recent operation on his arm, his streams were watched 403 thousand hours.

Dr Disrespect is the third with a score of 352 thousand hours and an average online score of 20 thousand viewers.

Results

Blevins returned to the game, which brought him worldwide fame - Fortnite. Grzesiek began to stream less due to two operations and spoke that he considers Apex Legends to be boring.

Bad luck always comes in threes: the growing popularity of the role-playing server GTA Online. Lirik, summit1g, TimTheTatman and many others have already switched to it. There are no signs that GTA will hold their attention, but it is essential to understand one thing. GTA Online, Fortnite and Apex Legends will not be able to coexist in the top of Twitch and gain 20 million hours a week. Streamers gave incredible popularity to Apex Legends - and now they are taking it away, taking the viewers away to watch other games. 

Perhaps Electronic Arts miscalculated?