Season 2 of Apex Legends was supposed to take the multiplayer battle royale shooter to greater heights — but so far has failed to meet expectations as a worthy competitor to Fortnite.
Season 2, which launched on July 2 and is named Battle Charge, altered the Kings Canyon map with the destructive arrival of Leviathans and Flyers. The new season also introduced a new character in the defense-focused Wattson, alongside an improved Battle Pass with more legendary items and new content types, the L-STAR energy-based light machine gun, and Ranked Leagues.
The trailer also provided clues to the next character that will debut after Wattson, in the mysterious figure that blew up the Repulsor Tower to usher in the beasts.
Battle Charge, however, has failed to attract Twitch viewership. Apex Legends hit a peak of about 674,000 daily viewers in its launch month of February, according to Twitch Tracker, but the game has so far been unable to breach 50,000 daily viewers since Season 2 started. The trend of declining monthly average viewership for Apex Legends has so far been broken in July with an average of about 35,000 daily viewers, but in comparison, Fortnite has an average of about 104,000 daily viewers in the month.
Electronic Arts was affected by the lackluster start to Apex Legends Season 2, with the publisher’s shares falling by about 9% between the launch of Battle Charge and the end of the week. The shares declined by as much as 5.6% on July 5, which was the company’s biggest fall for the past five months.
Some of the issues that players have reported with Season 2 involve Wattson. A bug in the character’s electric perimeter fences is apparently revealing her location to opponents, and a few players have had trouble in redeeming the Twitch Prime Wattson skin. These are not game-breaking problems, but they have contributed to the waning interest of viewers.
Wedbush Securities video game market analyst Michael Pachter, however, said in an interview with Bloomberg that this is still the early days for Apex Legends Season 2. People “are making a big deal out of Twitch views,” Pachter said, and while Twitch viewership will ultimately matter, it has only been a few days since the start of the new season, hinting at optimism that Battle Charge will soon start attracting a bigger audience.
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