SAN FRANCISCO, March 6 ― Watch out, Fortnite, as February's new Battle Royale contender Apex Legends continues to grow apace, logging 50 million players over its first four weeks.

Apex Legends launched February 4 across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC, developer Respawn Entertainment having saved its publicity drive for a short, sharp ramp-up to release and the days following its debut. The game has accumulated 50 million players in the four weeks since.

As Niko Partners industry analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out in a tweet, Apex Legends has been picking up players over four times as quickly as Battle Royal genre frontrunner Fortnite did back in 2017 when it took 16 weeks to reach a 45m headcount.

Both are free-to-play, last-person-standing online multiplayer games, and though Fortnite: Battle Royale is now available on iOS, Nintendo Switch, and Android, it was confined to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows PC and MacOS for its first seven months (27 weeks) of availability.

That said, when Fortnite landed in September 2017, it did so as a free, more accessible, and more family-friendly variation on the retail download PC game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), which had popularised Battle Royale in the first place.

As for Apex Legends, it dropped the Minecraft-style rapid fort construction of Fortnite, instead bringing a visual style (and presumptive demographic targeting) closer to that of PUBG and introduced several notable genre innovations.

For example, at launch, players could not play alone but were put into squads of three. Cooperation was further supported through an intuitive, non-verbal spotting system that let teammates highlight objects or locations for each others' benefit.

In keeping with its studio's name, Apex Legends also added a respawn system, through which players could revive fallen teammates at fixed locations.

However, Fortnite: Battle Royale is expected to integrate some of the more unique aspects of Apex Legends.

For instance, a Fortnite developer said mid-February that the team had been "considering [a respawn] mechanic for a while” ahead of the game's Season 8 in March.

Observant players began finding a number of circular pads with translucent humanoid figures atop at various locations around the Fortnite map ― some on the ground, some on modified repair vans ― a clue that Fortnite had found its variation on the respawning theme. ― AFP-Relaxnews