Apex Legends had an exciting 2024, marking five years with a special event full of free goodies and easy-to-get rare currency, making players happy.
Respawn decided to change the battle-pass, which made some players really mad and dropped its Steam review score. EA decided not to make a sequel but to improve the game we already have.
“Following changes to the battle-pass construct, we did not see the lift in monetisation we had expected,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned during a recent earnings call. “We will continue to focus on retention and breadth of content in service of our global community as we work towards more significant, innovative changes in the future.”
When someone asked about making a new version of the game, Wilson said no way.
“Typically, what we have seen in the context of live service-driven games at scale is the ‘version two’ thing has almost never been as successful as the ‘version one’ thing,” Wilson explained, possibly referring to some of Overwatch 2’s recent struggles. “And so actually, the objective right now is to ensure that we are continuing to support the global playerbase that we have, and deliver them new, innovative, creative content on a season-by-season basis, as well as build these other things, but build them in a way that players do not have to give up the progress that they’ve made or the investment that they’ve put into the existing ecosystem.”
There was talk for two years about a single-player game set in the Apex Legends world, but EA and Respawn kept changing their minds about it. People thought they might make a sequel like Overwatch or Destiny, but EA has bigger plans to keep the game going for 10-15 years. So, Wilson’s announcement wasn’t a shock.
“Any time we cause a global player community to have to choose between the investments they’ve made to date and future innovation and creativity, that’s never a good place to put our community in,” Wilson said about EA’s decision not to start from scratch. “Our objective will be to continue to innovate in the core [gameplay] experience, and then build additional opportunities for engagement in different modalities of play beyond what the current core mechanic delivers. And we think we can do those two things together, and we don’t believe we have to separate the experience in order to do so.”
Fans sometimes wonder why companies make such big changes, but we just love the excitement it brings.
Respawn began changing the game a lot in 2023 with Season 18, giving a spooky character a new look and abilities. In 2024, they made even more big changes, like showing enemy health bars and adding the Legend Upgrade system. So, while there’s no “Apex Legends 2” coming soon, the game is definitely getting a fresh feel, and Wilson thinks it’ll keep growing for a long time.
