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Another one bites the dust in the Apex Legends universe, with its mobile version going offline in May 2023. We’ve just received the bad news that the single-player forray has been canceled and now this. Apex fans cannot catch a break it seems.
This isn’t THAT surprising, to be honest. While Apex Legends for PCs and consoles has a player base above 100 million, the mobile version was just shy of 10. It seems like EA didn’t like the development cycle and slow return on its original investment. After all, the mobile market is currently booming – games like COD Warzone, Fortnite, PUBG, and Genshin are generating billions. However, Apex was obviously struggling to gain strong traction.
A troubled mobile port
There are many rumors as to why the game “failed”. The definition of a failed product, especially when EA is involved is kind of blurry.
Let’s start with the obvious: lack of content. The game saw way fever legends than its bigger counterpart. The original ones which were added such as Fade and Rhapsody were cool enough. The issue was, the game failed to keep up with its offering. Just comparable to its main competitors, it took much longer to release updates and varied content to keep players invested.
Now, he clencher what everyone saw coming – horrible technical difficulties. The game’s servers weren’t up to snuff, and the flow of the matches was even worse than on the Nintendo Switch. Not to mention, there was lag, and aiming was sometimes impossible.
If you’re familiar with Apex in general, you’d see how much this impacts gameplay. As one of the fastest and most movement-reliant BRs out there, people quickly got out.
It doesn’t take long to see that fans that went into the mobile Apex experience, actually loved it. They city how well the game looked, and how easy it was to translate some of the movement tech skills on a touch screen, no matter how limited.
Over before it truly began
The final nail in the coffin was, of course, EA’s aggressive stance on in-app purchases. The game was riddled with them. Players started to realize that the game was a cash grab. Instead of investing in quality content that kept expanding the game world, we were getting more skins. There were some interesting innovative approaches like the legend-specific weapons which will hopefully transition into the main game.
Something similar is happening to the OG Apex but people are way more vocal there. Sadly, on mobile, they just left.
This in the end left the game in its apathetic state. With EA not seeing a significant surge in subs and skin purchases, they simply pulled the plug. However, there’s at least some silver lining. The company promises the game will be back, better than ever. They say a new engine will be introduced AND it will be done properly by Respawn’s primary team.
