Apex Legends (25M Players) + OWL S2

Apex Legends

After launching just last week, the game has already amassed over 25 million players. They spent zero dollars on TV advertising and only paid Twitch Streamers for the first 48 hours before letting it grow organically from there. This will be the playbook for many games to come (secrecy ahead of the launch + paying streamers not TV ads). Apex Legends is a 3 man-squad battle royale (like Fortnite) that is glitch free (unlike PUBG) and has hero aspects (like Overwatch) in a very dynamic first-person shoot gameplay (like Call of Duty, but better).

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‍Overwatch League

The OWL kicked off with Season 2 this week. It hit 200k average concurrent (excluding China) with a max concurrent of 300k viewers (32% below max CCV of 441k at the launch of Season 1). The finals of Season 1 had  peak concurrent viewers of 319k, so it seems to already be trending down. The launch of Apex Legends just ahead of OWL Season 2 was certainly no coincidence, adding another strong argument for the bear case for a video game that is chaotic to watch.