Apex Legends developer addresses the possibility of a Switch port
Apex Legends has made a huge impact on Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC. But will the newly popular battle royal be coming to the Nintendo Switch?
Developer Respawn Entertainment has noted that Switch fans are eagerly anticipating Apex Legends coming to the Nintendo console, but project lead Drew McCoy recently told Wired that a Switch edition is not yet in the works.
“If Swich was coming, we would tell you, and we would blast it across the world. I can’t make any promises right now. We have a lot of things that we’re working on, so stay tuned for anything in the future,” McCoy said.
He added that there is nothing to announce for the Switch at this moment. McCoy never said that a Switch port won’t happen. But he did make clear that it isn’t happening just yet.
The Nintendo Switch fan base isn’t without battle royale games at the moment. Epic’s Fortnite is available on the console. In fact, Fortnite was downloaded over two million times on the Switch in the 24 hours following its announcement at E3 last year.
By the end of 2018, Fortnite was downloaded around 10 million times by Switch users, an interesting statistic when you factor in that 22 million total Switch units had been sold at that point. That means nearly 50 percent of Switch users had downloaded Fortnite.
Epic’s battle royale is also linked to the console’s surge in Nintendo Switch Online subscribers.
With Fortnite making such an impact on the Nintendo Switch, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that Apex Legends might soon follow in its footsteps.
Across its three current platforms, the new battle royal boasts over 50 million players just a few months removed from its initial surprise release. It took only eight hours for the game to reach one million players, 24 hours to reach 2.5 million, and just 72 hours to reach 10 million. After one week of play, Apex Legends had broken all kinds of records and had hit 25 million total players.
The game’s popularity now rivals that of established battle royale titles such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.