Apex Legends is on the decline with streamers after a record-setting month

The month after setting a new all-time weekly viewership record for Twitch, Apex Legends’ popularity with streamers and viewers has started to decline.

According to data collected by StreamElements and StreamHatcher on major streaming platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer across the first three months of 2019, the decline comes as top streamers move on to focus on other games.

The report offers up interesting data on how attention from top streamers can affect a game’s viewership on Twitch and other streaming platforms, something especially notable in the case of Apex Legends, which launched with a big streamer-led marketing push a few months back. 

By those numbers, Apex Legends has lost about 75 percent of its peak viewership (40 million hours watched per week) between February and March and, as of mid-March, sat around 10 million weekly hours watched instead. 

It’s a decline that StreamElements attributes to the shifting focus of the top streamers on each platform. According to the company’s data, 10 of the top 20 streamers focused on Apex Legends during February when the game hit its viewership peak. During March only two of those top 20 were still focusing on the game.

Fortnite, meanwhile, has seen a slight decline from StreamElements' last quarterly report, but has remained stable compared to Apex Legends' recent arc. Between Q4 2018 and this Q1 2019 report, StreamElements data says that Fortnite's viewership hours fell by around 8 percent.