EA value drops by $3.3b as Apex Legends enters season 2

Last week wasn’t very lucky for EA. Company’s market cap fell by nearly 10%. This is due to players’ cold reception of Apex Legends 2.

After the title’s huge success back in February, the investors considered Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale the main driver of EA’s future growth. However, the developers have failed to maintain players engaged.

Apex Legends Season 2 was launched on July 2. At that time, EA stock peaked at $103.39. Since then it has been falling, and on Monday the company traded at $92.24 per share. In other words, last Tuesday the company value was estimated at $30.7b. A week later it fell to $27.5b.

The analysts attribute this to the game’s poor performance on Twitch. Apex Legends 2 has an average of 42,000 viewers daily. When the game launched in winter, this metric reached 278,000.

GitHyp data confirms that the update failed to restore the game to its former popularity. Its daily audience is dropping to the July’s plateau of 15,000 – 20,000 daily viewers.

This is still an impressive result for a free-to-play game. However, it’s significantly lower than the daily viewership of Fortnite and Counter-Strike.