On February 4, several high profile gaming influencers like Ninja, Shroud, and Dr.Disrespect, were sponsored to play and stream a never-seen-before battle royale game — Apex Legends. Within the first 8 hours, the title gained a staggering number of 1 million players. After the first 24 hours, it hit 2.5 million players. And, by the end of its first week, it surpassed 25 million players.
Given that it’s been over a month since EA surprised the world with Respawn Entertainment’s masterpiece (over 50 million players now), we decided to conduct a comparative analysis on how Apex Legends and Fortnite Battle Royale performed on YouTube in their first 30 days. We then examined their performance in the past 30 days in a similar manner — by analyzing their accumulative video count and viewership.
Although Apex Legends is currently taking the gaming world by storm, Fortnite is still the leading battle royale game on YouTube.
The data is brought to you by Matchmade, the intelligent influencer marketing platform. Every few minutes, we analyze all gaming-related channels and videos on YouTube and Twitch. That’s over 3.8 million channels, 371 million videos on YouTube, 15 million streams on Twitch, and 26 000 games.
Data disclaimer: The data we provide is based on the latest video view count and number of videos that could have accumulated at any given point.
Video Count + Viewership in Their First 30 Days
We started our data dive by analyzing the performance of Apex Legends and Fortnite Battle Royale on YouTube in their first 30 days. According to the Matchmade platform, Apex Legends has reached a total of 695 million views, and Fortnite Battle Royale (released on September 26, 2017) has also gained 474 million views by the end of the 30 days. Just by looking at viewership, it’s evident that Apex Legends is doing significantly better than Fortnite Battle Royale, when it was first released.
In terms of video count, the data available shows that Apex Legends is also leading on YouTube with 8437 videos to date, while Fortnite Battle Royale has 3761 accumulative videos.
Video Count + Viewership in the Past 30 Days
However, when we compared the performance of Apex Legends to Fortnite in the past 30 days, the results were the opposite. The graphs illustrate that Fortnite is ahead of Apex Legends on YouTube by 3.9 billion views and 27 554 videos.
Both titles gained the following number of views and videos in the past 30 days:
- Fortnite: 4.3 billion views, 33 416 videos
- Apex: 412 million views, 5862 videos
Why though?
- Options — Fortnite players can battle alone AND as a squad.. whereas, Apex players can only play as a team. Also, Apex doesn’t support cross play… yet.
- Fortnite reaches a broader range of audiences — the game appeals to both skilled players like Ninja, and younger audiences like children.
- According to Forbes, Fortnite has become the next new social network for youths, where they can chat and play with their friends. Also, just last month, the game hosted its first in-game concert (featuring DJ Marshmello), in which 10.7 million players attended!
- Fortnite has been around longer, which means there has been more content creators producing organic content related to game on YouTube than Apex. When there’re more videos available to watch, there’s little doubt viewership and the popularity of the game increase.
Regardless, Apex Legends is off to a great start, and a good challenger to Fortnite as it can be difficult to stand out as a Fortnite-content-creator, especially on YouTube.
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Since you’re already here, check out some funny Apex Legends videos we found on YouTube: