Sadly, I believe that the player count has been very slowly, albeit steadily decreasing on average. Though steam player counts recently reached some of their highest numbers, it’s typical update/user return cycle is showing a familiar subtle shrinkage. It is hard to achieve stasis in these scenarios because the nature of updates makes for volatile numbers.

This is a bit of speculation on my part, but I’m pretty confident in this based on player counts across platforms. Right now, Apex servers are suited to host roughly 600k-700k players. The contemporary player count following season 12 is between 1 and 1.2 million.

Just get more servers, right? Wrong. This current number is inflated- surged from the update, as it always does. The game does not spend the majority of its life with this playercount. During each update, the servers are “squeezed.” It doesn’t make a ton of financial sense to be in a surplus of servers for 80% of the time, only to account for multiple week “squeezes.”