EA's Apex Legends looks like the real deal. After an earnings driven stock dump to the previous lows, EA has since soared due to the incredible launch of Apex Legends from Respawn, their new F2P squad based battle royale. They launched it suddenly a week ago, 91% on Metacritic, smartly paying the top streamers to focus on it. Since those payments ended, the streamers are still focusing on the game because the audiance is still there. On Twitch it's well ahead of Fortnite. EA said a few days ago it was at 10M unique users and 1M concurrent. Fortnite was recently at 200M unique users and 10M concurrent during some concert event, and in November they said 8.3M concurrent.

Unique user counts means little aside from a potential way to boost the stock price, as it will include some who went from Fortnite to Apex to try it out, then returned to Fortnite. They're no longer Apex players but they're counted forever as unique users. We should be more interested in DAU, ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per DAU), MAU, LTV, etc., however in the absence of that being available to the public all we have to go on are the Respawn comments about UU's and concurrent. So it's building a nice audience and the consensus so far seems it should be able to retain that audience for the near future at least. Whether it can do so for a full year or more, who knows right now. Fortnite has pulled in at least $3BN revenue in the last year. If Apex does even 10% of that, that would be $300M of high margin revenue to add to EA's approx $5BN revenue. Of course the stock could price in a lot more hype and potential than that, with plenty of weekend news stories already about it being a strong Fortnite competitor. Wall St is desperate to get in on something like that I think.

I don't believe it will dethrone Fortnite. It's squad based. Also it's not on mobile or Switch, nor is it crossplay. Some of those could be resolved over time of course. I also don't believe it will pull players exclusively from Fortnite either. I think it will pull some from Fortnite, and some from CoD Blackout, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield, etc. This will also help drive Origin downloads.