Attendees visit the Electronic Arts (EA) Inc. display at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, California.
Patrick Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Electronic Arts fell more than 5% Friday morning after initial viewership numbers for a new release failed to reach previous highs.
The video game company released season 2 of the popular game Apex Legends on Tuesday, but the new season failed to capture the audience on Twitch that the game had seen earlier this year. The game had roughly 45,000 viewers on Wednesday, according to Twitch Tracker. Apex Legends had more than 100,000 viewers in a day as recently as March.
Apex Legends is a free to play game, similar to Epic Games’ Fortnite. Electronic Arts’ stock got a boost earlier this year when Legends first launched and quickly accumulated 10 million players.
Jeff Cohen, an analyst at Stephens who is bullish on EA, said the move is “pretty drastic and definitely feels oversold to me.” Stephens named the company a best idea in the console space last month, citing expectations of a strong performance from season 2 of the game.
Cohen said that other measures of engagement with Apex Legends, including Reddit activity and the number of Twitch channels streaming the game, were encouraging.
Two of EA’s main competitors were also down on Friday. Activision fell 3.41%, while Take-Two fell 1.91%.