Apex Legends season 16 kicked off on Feb. 14, and it was one of the game’s more notable seasonal releases in recent memory thanks to the fact that it was the first in Apex history to launch without a new legend.
With a focus instead on celebrating its fourth anniversary and rebuilding the foundation Apex is built on, Revelry has already proven to be a massive hit with the player base. Apex hit a new all-time peak player count on Steam of 610,433 the day after release, according to SteamDB.
It’s a welcome sign for Respawn that it is back on the right track with Apex’s seasonal releases after season 15 struggled to bring in players in the same way. Season 15’s launch peaked with only around 400,000 players in comparison, a significant dip from season 14’s peak of 511,676—a number that was Apex’s highest player count on record prior to Revelry.
Season 16 features a complete rework to the class system in Apex, reorganizing and adding new passives to all the legends currently on the roster. This, in tangent with balance changes hitting specific pain points such as the scan meta, led Respawn to believe a new legend on top of it all would be too chaotic for the sandbox. Design director Evan Nikolich described the break in legend releases as “a chance to really dig deep and focus our attention on enhancing the core experience of Apex.”
As SteamDB proves, Respawn made the right move. A new weapon, the introduction of a long-requested Team Deathmatch mode, and thorough balance changes appear to be more than enough to get players excited about Apex again.
Legend releases are expected to return to their regular seasonal cadence next time around. Respawn will be hoping that the foundations laid for a healthier future for Apex in Revelry will extend outwards to make future seasonal releases just as popular with the player base. While SteamDB only represents a single platform of play, the numbers from it can be extrapolated to suggest similar stories of success across consoles as well.
