'Apex Legends' hits an impressive 10 million players

Just three days after it launched, Apex Legends has already hit 10 million players, with a peak concurrent player count of more than 1 million, developer Respawn Entertainment announced Thursday.

The battle royale game launched on Monday at the same time as it was revealed by Respawn Entertainment, the developers behind Titanfall. The game is free to play and is available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, which surely helped it reach a high number of players in such a short time — why not try a free game?

Apex Legends was inspired by other wildly popular battle royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds where players drop down onto an island where the playable area gets smaller and smaller as people fight to be the last survivors.

Apex Legends distinguishes itself from the competition with its unique characters, each with distinct abilities and personalities, as well as the fact that if you play your cards right you can revive your dead squadmates.

Right now it looks like Apex Legends could be going the way of Fortnite and PUBG in terms of popularity, but we'll have to see how the next few months go. If Respawn Entertainment manages to keep a steady stream of content updates coming, things could go in their favor.

For perspective, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, one of the most popular games of 2018, sold 3 million copies after 11 days, to Apex Legends' 10 million. Of course, Smash was $60 and Apex Legends is free, so it's tough to compare them directly.

Fortnite was also a slower burn than Apex Legends, given the fact that it didn't even launch with its popular Battle Royale mode – but that mode still took two weeks to hit 10 million players.

It'll be hard for Apex Legends to beat the eventual records hit by PUBG and Fortnite, which have racked up hundreds of millions of players. But 10 million players after just 72 hours is an impressive start.