Within two weeks of launch, 79m hours of Apex Legends were watched on Twitch.

That's going by data from platform tracker SullyGnome from Tuesday, February 19th (below), which reckons that 79,025,495 hours of Respawn and EA's free-to-play battle royale title were watched in its first 14 days in the wild.

For the same period, long-time market leader Fortnite was watched for 37,387,433 hours, meaning that Apex Legends boasts twice as many hours watched for its first, er, fortnight post-release.

Apex Legends was streamed for 3.4m hours compared to Fortnite's 3.3m. 48,662 hours separated the two free-to-play battle royale titles on Twitch.

While this is an impressive start for EA and Respawn's take on the genre, Fortnite is gaining on the newcomer. Where last week, Apex Legends boasted as high as 3.1 times Fortnite's viewership in terms of hours watched, the data for the first two weeks shows that in Respawn's battle royale was watched for twice as long as Fortnite.

Looking at data from the last three days, Apex Legends' lead is decreasing. The game boasts 15,559,409 hours watched in the last 72 hours, compared to Fortnite's 9,952,898 placing the newcomer with a lead of just 1.5 times that of Epic's battle royale game. Apex Legends is 1.8 times ahead of Fortnite for the last seven days.

This indicates that people might have been tuning in initially to get a feel for Apex Legends following its surprise release - with some of the top streamers in the world playing this new battle royale title - but interest is returning to Fortnite.

In this games-as-a-service world that we live in, it's vital that Respawn has a cadence of content to drive continued interest in Apex Legends moving forwards.

Between February 4th and 17th, per our sibling title InfluencerUpdate.biz and according to Stream Hachette, 84.8m hours of Apex Legends was watched across Twitch, Mixer, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Live. For the same period, Fortnite was watched for 52.2m hours.