In an interview with GamesBeat, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said: “We haven’t seen any visible cut into Fortnite.” According to Tim, Apex Legends downloads, sales, and popularity haven’t affected Fortnite.
It isn’t news that Apex Legends download rate is continuing to dominate the battle royale playfield. That isn’t good news for the competition, namely Fortnite. Apex Legends quickly overtook Fortnite in terms of player numbers in a matter of weeks. Apex Legends in-game sales are also booming at this point.
Apex downloads hit 50 million players within just four weeks of launching (with no prior marketing). You can put that insane growth into perspective by looking at Fortnite which took full 16 weeks to reach 45 million. From these numbers, you can somewhat understand how competitive the battle royal genre is.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney talked more about this in an interview with GamesBeat
We’re very close to hitting 250 million Fortnite players. Since Apex Legends came out, we’ve gained an Apex Legends worth of Fortnite players, which is amazing.
He further remarked on both games by saying:
We hit a Fortnite non-event peak twice after Apex was out. We haven’t seen any visible cut into Fortnite. It’s a funny thing. The only game you can see where its peaks cut into Fortnite playtime is FIFA. It’s another game for everybody, wildly popular around the world.
Further, in the interview, the Epic Games head honcho noted that Apex has actually helped re-energize gamers and he’s pleased to see it offering its own spin on the genre.
When asked about other battle royale games, Sweeney had this to say
“What Apex Legends has done is re-energized a lot of shooter players, people who come in and out of shooters depending on what’s popular,” said Sweeney. “It’s awesome to see other games picking up on battle royale, adding their unique spin to it and advancing the state of the industry.”
Right now Apex is dominating the charts. Fortnite might see an even more increase in numbers thanks to the new v8.10 patch.
Fortnite is now available to play on Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, Mobile and PlayStation 4.
