Apex Legends has taken over the battle royale market by storm. PUBG used to be the first well known and one of the only battle royales. Fortnite quickly took over when it released a battle royale game mode. Now the new kid in town, Apex Legends is taking over the market.

    Apex Legends came out Feb. 4 and only 28 days later, it had over 50 million players. The growth rate compared to Fortnite is astronomical. Fortnite took over four months to get to 50 million players whereas Apex Legends took less than a month. It can be argued the Fortnite made the battle royale game type popular. Apex Legends’ player population keeps rising, the new player rate slightly decreasing, but is on track to overthrow Fortnite as the top battle royal.

    Younger gamers, though, are taking their time to buy in to the Apex Legends Trend and still remain dedicated to Fortnite. According to a survey of 54 Bishop Noll students, 64% of the students said that they still preferred Fortnite, while only 36% said that they liked Apex Legends better. Some students said that they liked Fortnite better because of the building feature, others said they only liked it better because they never played Apex Legends. The students that said they preferred Apex said mostly that the gameplay was more fluid or it was more fun.

    Fortnite clearly views Apex Legends as a fierce competitor by the features they keep implementing into the game. Apex Legends launched with a feature to communicate with squadmates silently, also known as the ping system. This system allows players to mark locations, enemies, weapons, shields, helmets, and health items. Fortnite never had anything of the sort until Apex Legends players showed love for the system. Fortnite than launched their own ping system to allow players to mark certain things.

   There are also rumors going around that Fortnite might launch a respawn system into their game. Apex Legends is a unique battle royale because it launched with a feature to allow teammates to get teammates back into the fight after dying. Some people use this evidence to say that Fortnite is desperately trying to grab back players that made the Apex Legends switch and may not look back.