EA is planning to massively expand Apex Legends, pushing the free-to-play multiplayer game outside of its battle royale boundaries. As EA aims to bring more players to the game, developer Respawn Entertainment will be introducing new modes to the game.
With Apex Legends Season 20 pushing new legends ability upgrades, fans of the battle royale game have been eating well. Alongside the newest character Conduit, Respawn’s multiplayer game is still very much alive, but EA wants more.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson told attendees of the 2024 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that there are huge plans to continue growing Apex in the coming years. With “hundreds of millions of players” over its five year history, Wilson believes there’s potential for “incredible growth” for the company.
“If you’re thinking about streaming services which are dealing with 40% and 50% churn, we’ve got a core community in Apex that has 75% retention over the course of a five-year period — it’s an incredible franchise,” Wilson said (via VGC). “But in the growth of franchises, we do see ebbs and flows, and where we’ve gotten to with Apex, is we’ve got that first cohort of community that have been with us now for five years, and it’s big, it’s large, it’s global and it’s deeply engaged.”
Wilson told attendees that Apex Legends needs to become more accommodating to new players in order to keep growing. Upcoming content will aim to be “new player friendly”, starting with Season 20. Wilson explained that recent content has already pushing the game back to “numbers that are more like the numbers that we’d seen at the peak.”
“The next phase will then be, how do we think about more modalities of play, how do you expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe? And we’ll start to see that in the coming year,” the EA CEO explained.
Apex Legends’ expansion outside of just battle royale could be done in multiple ways. We could see the introduction of more traditional deathmatch - similar to Warzone’s implementation into Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3. On the other hand, we could see more community-led inclusions like Halo Infinite’s Forge or even multiple game packages like Fortnite, Fortnite Festival, LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing all housed under the same banner.
It’s clear with the failure of countless live service games over the past few years that just one live service isn’t enough. This may be why companies such as Rooster Teeth killer Warner Bros is doubling down on live services after the colossal failure of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
Apex Legends is currently available as a free to play game on numerous platforms.