With two years behind it, Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale title has established itself as one of EA’s main strongholds.
It all started in the most unusual way. February 2019, a time when Titanfall fans took it for granted that Respawn Entertainment’s next thing was going to be Titanfal 3. But no. After the first two deliveries in 2014 and 2016, both surrounded by critical success, but not so much in sales, EA took over the company in November 2017 for a payment of more than $ 400 million. The operation resulted in the absorption of a group with a superlative talent when it comes to understanding the genre of the FPS; but nobody expected that his next project was going to be a multiplayer battle royale under a free-to-play business model.
And the premiere of Apex Legends came without warning.
Apex legends
How to stand up to Fortnite without failing in the attempt
The context of the moment also takes us to the period where Fortnite began to grow at breakneck speed, leaving other competitors such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds behind, to the point that Epic Games would thus begin a plan to attract attention and market share that culminated the birth of the Epic Games Store. Tim Sweeney’s firm was going for it; Electronic Arts identified an upward trend and turned the new Respawn project into a sum of aspects with more and more predisposition on the part of users.
Business model? Free-to-play. Game mode? Multiplayer and battle royale; all against all. Gameplay? That of one of the leading studios, Respawn Entertainment, which they knew about for a while about jumps and first-person shots. Promotion vehicle? Content creators with millions of followers on online streaming portals. No one saw the result coming until a few hours before its announcement. Actually, it was all planned.
EA’s secret project was rumored as “Titanfall battle royale” or “Titanfall: Apex Legends”, but eventually the reference to that intellectual property fell from the nomenclature; not so the recognized setting in his universe. It was finally made official, again under a usual methodology: the game would be available the next day for free for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Dozens of online streamers elevated Apex Legends to the first position in the rankings of the most viewed and downloaded video games, garnering more than a million players in just eight hours. Chance? Temporary success? What will happen the day after endorsement deals with those content creators end? The skepticism around the project led by Vince Zampella was logical, since there are many fleeting successes that continue to fall today after a few weeks or months.
50 million players in 28 days
The reality is very different with Apex Legends, which in just 28 days reached 50 million players; what Fortnite took in four months. In October of that same year, with three seasons behind him, 70 million players. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, doubts and other emerging phenomena such as Call of Duty: Warzone, with which it shares a target audience, Apex registered a 30% growth in new players compared to the previous year. “We have had another great quarter, driven by the performance of our services in Ultimate Team and Apex Legends,” said Blake Jorgensen, COO of Electronic Arts, on the occasion of the presentation of results on December 31, 2020. Apex Legends has become in a financial pillar in Electronic Arts, at the height of the almighty FIFA, whose formula has been paying off for five years. The Apex one does not fall short and shows a concatenation of successes with an increasingly satisfied community.
How to get it right in a free-to-play game surrounded by competitors
In every video game there are a series of intangibles that go beyond quality or budget. No one could predict that Fall Guys and Among Us would go down in history as two of the names in the industry in 2020; Nor that a group of streamers could turn Rust into the game of fashion for a few weeks. Not to mention the 5 million units sold from Valheim in a month. The power of mobilization of influencers is total, while word of mouth has allowed that, once the storm has passed, Apex Legends has continued to grow without making too much noise, but polishing aspects and responding to the demands of its players.
We were talking about successes, one of them is none other than the seasonal model. There are eight; some better received than others, but all maintaining a pattern of new battle passes, leveling up, unlocking items, cosmetics, weapons, adjustments … and Legends, characters where each one assumes a role, thus offering a certain touch of hero shooter as others like Overwatch did years ago.
In addition, Apex Legends is not a pay-to-win, the adjective that is given to those multiplayer video games with integrated purchases where the progression system is directly affected by obvious advantages when making payments. In Apex Legends, practically everything can be unlocked by playing and getting the fictitious currency of the title itself, a currency that is used to redeem content that can also be obtained with real money. The shadow of Star Wars Battlefront II is very long, a multi-million dollar production that was affected at its premiere by a clearly pay-to-win improvement system. Respawn’s work came with the lesson learned, making it easier to let that frustration out, eliminating cheaters, and studying at all times how to generate the most difficult thing in any multiplayer title: loyalty.
During this time we have seen gifts, rewards for linking the account with platforms such as Amazon, rewards for logging in … In addition, the seasons are only three or four months, a way to slightly reset the total status of the games and allowing those who the more time they spent having cosmetic benefits on the next.
Arrival on Steam; a second residence
It was so surprising that Electronic Arts announced that it was going to bring its video games back to Steam (progressively) on PC after betting everything on EA Origin as the premiere of EA Play (its current nomenclature) on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for consoles. From limiting your access and not getting the expected results to being open to absolutely everything; to the Epic Games Store (and give away Star Wars Battlefront II for a week!). From the most closed EA to the most open EA. The side effect is that Apex Legends found a new home, Steam, where it is currently one of the most played titles.
According to the monitoring portal SteamCharts, since the arrival of Apex Legends to Steam last November, the monthly growth has been constant since December. Currently, an average of 123,700 daily players and peaks like the one experienced at the beginning of this month of March, with more than 207,000 concurrent users. It is at its best in the middle of Season 8. This Season 8, which brings a new Legend, Fuse, a new Battle Pass and ranked, continues to win faithful.
The success of Apex Legends in four keys
Alejandro Castillo, in charge of analyzing the news of the game and reporting on it in FreeGameTips, establishes the following four keys to understanding the success of Apex Legends over time:
Playable formula with identity. Respawn has drawn the lines between battle royale and pure hero shooter. Being designed based on an indivisible squad of 3 people makes the synergies between the champions a differentiating factor, relevant in the course of the games. Your knowledge of character traits is more influential than your own skill with the weapon; quite the opposite of what competitors like CoD: Warzone are looking for.
Background. Practically from its first anniversary, the foundations of its universe began to be laid. These types of service games go beyond just a handful of players trying to survive. There are elements that connect the characters to each other. Dialogues, winks, audiovisual pieces as part of the promotion … Today’s players feel that they are part of a constantly expanding universe. We saw it, for example, with the arrival of Season 7. The background of Horizon, the reason why he traveled to Olympus and what steps he is going to follow, how the rest of the cast influences it … For the faithful community it is important to root Plot concepts, just like Rainbow Six: Siege started a couple of years ago.
Periodicity. The pace of Apex Legends may have been somewhat lower than that of other current battle royales, but this does not mean that it has introduced less content. In fact, if we stop to make that comparison, it has added more playable environments and concepts (in the form of maps and heroes) than shooters like Overwatch or Warzone in the same period of time. In addition, the Seasons are nourished with complementary thematic events that help provide variety. There is not a week that there is not something new, even if they are other crazy game modes.
Quality. Respawn had an advantage from the first minute. The playable structure (control, gunplay, the way the player can take advantage of the environment) had a Titanfall flavor. They may be games with their pluses and minuses, but the couple of installments of that saga were quality shooters. At the controls they feel just as good. With limitations, as usual, but with the same fast, direct, seamless approach. Easy to play and difficult to master. An FPS that is enjoyed from the first minute joins together with the characteristics of the hero shooter.
And in the future, what?
The truth is that Apex Legends is no longer just a video game and has become a platform, a service. EA understands it this way, a live service capable of feeding the company’s economic reports based on sustainability; both of players and in the investment and income balance. Jorgensen said during the presentation of results to shareholders last November: “We started the year [2020] hoping that Apex Legends could generate between $ 300 million and $ 400 million in net bookings. You are now on track to be able to offer more than $ 500 million […] In other words, Apex will have gone from zero to close to a billion dollars in total revenue in just two years. ” Given this scenario, added to the arrival of the free video game (again, free-to-play) to mobile devices in the future and a console such as Nintendo Switch, which has an installed base of 79.87 million players up to last December, EA expects to soon surpass 1 billion in turnover.
Apex Legends arrives on March 9 on Nintendo Switch, a platform with a very different audience, but where others like Fortnite have found a refuge embraced by success. If we are facing a new rebound in the game or not is something that we will know very soon. Meanwhile, the power of this name continues to gain traction in the market.
References | EA Report Q3 / FY21; SteamCharts
