It’s been a big year for Apex Legends. Respawn’s hit battle royale kicked off 2024 by celebrating its fifth anniversary with an in-game event that offered free rewards and granted easy access to one of the game’s rarest currencies, a move that players appreciated. Respawn also reworked its battle-pass system, a move that resulted in furious players and a plummeting Steam review score. But rather than taking the same route as other live-service shooters and releasing a sequel, EA has reaffirmed its commitment to refining the game in its current form.
“Following changes to the battle-pass construct, we did not see the lift in monetisation we had expected,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in a recent earnings conference 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 asked about the potential for a sequel, Wilson immediately shut the idea down.
“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.”
Over the last two years, EA and Respawn have gone back and forth on plans for a single-player game set in the Apex Legends/Titanfall universe, but eventually canceled it (and then un-canceled it). So it makes sense that players and investors might expect the franchise to follow in the footsteps of live-service shooters like Overwatch and Destiny by releasing a sequel. But Wilson’s statement shouldn’t come as a surprise–EA has a 10- to 15-year plan for the game, a fact the publisher has also stated in previous conference calls and earnings reports.
“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 of EA’s refusal to rebuild the game from the ground up. “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.”
Respawn began reworking the game in a major way in 2023, starting with the launch of Season 18, which saw one of the game’s creepiest characters get an (arguably creepier) makeover and a new set of abilities. 2024 saw more massive changes to the game’s meta, like the addition of visible enemy health bars and the introduction of the Legend Upgrade system. So although an “Apex Legends 2” isn’t on the horizon, Respawn has already begun the process of rejuvenating the game, and Wilson’s comments suggest that Apex will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
