A second crack at Apex Legends isn’t something EA is looking into at the current time.
EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson chatted to investors last night, during the company’s quarterly earnings call. Here, Wilson was asked about the company’s live-service efforts, and the next season of Respawn’s shooter, Apex Legends.
The EA exec said the “level of innovation and creativity has to continue to scale with the community over time” in order to “maintain growth, and not just maintain size”. He noted Apex is in “an incredibly good position” within the live-service market, with a “strong brand, a really strong mechanic, and a very committed global community”.
EA understands a “need for meaningful systematic innovation that fundamentally changes the way the game plays”, the exec continued, stating the development team is actively working on realising this. When further asked if EA and Respawn would consider an “Apex 2.0” or “a whole studs-up rebuild”, Wilson said current trends show a second go at something typically doesn’t perform as well as the original.
Said Wilson: “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. And so actually the objective right now is to ensure that we are continuing to support the global player base 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.
“Anytime 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 EA and Repsawn’s objective is to “continue to innovate in the core experience [as shown in Apex Legend’s seasons], and then build additional opportunities for engagement in different modalities of play beyond what the current core mechanic delivers”. The exec said the team believed it “can do those two things together”, and it doesn’t “have to separate the experience in order to do so”.
Wilson’s comments bring to mind Blizzard’s Overwatch series. Despite huge popularity for the original, the company pulled Overwatch as it was out of service, and replaced it with the free-to-play Overwatch 2.
On its release, Overwatch 2 users were left unable to play for long periods, stuck in queues, left without access to previously-unlocked characters and items, or locked out of the game entirely by the requirement to log-in using their mobile phones.
This year, things remain lukewarm for the rejigged shooter, and in February Activision Blizzard announced plans to make “major changes” to Overwatch 2 as part of a “revitalisation” of the shooter that hoped to “make PvP gameplay more rewarding and fun”, as well as “provide greater transparency for players in-game”. In May, the developer announced plans to remove the Hero Mastery Gauntles PvE mode from the game three months after it launched as it hadn’t “resonated with players”.
Elsewhere in the same EA call, Wilson said Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a “return to what made BioWare great”.
The company also announced its life-sim game The Sims 4 has managed to gain over 15m new players this year alone.
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