As Apex Legends engagement declines, EA suggests it’s not planning ‘Version 2’

EA is planning to make significant changes to Apex Legends designed to address a decline in player engagement and missed revenue targets.

“We do have a moment right now where we are managing the current trajectory of the business,” CEO Andrew Wilson acknowledged during the company’s second quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

“But we believe by virtue of the strength of the brand, the size of the global community, the position we hold in the top tier of these free-to-play live service games, that we’ll be able to return that to growth in the business side over the course of time.”

Wilson said Apex Legends Season 22, which launched in early August, had fallen short of expectations.

“Following changes to the battle pass construct, we did not see the lift in monetisation we had expected,” he said.

“Two things have become clear in the free-to-play FPS category. First, in the competitive landscape where brand, a strong core player base and high quality mechanics matter more than ever, Apex has proven to be a compelling franchise for us and an industry stalwart.

“Second, to drive significant growth and re-engagement, large systematic change is required. 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.”

During a Q&A session, EA was essentially asked to explain the pros and cons of incrementally improving the game in its existing form, versus fully rebuilding the title and releasing “something like an Apex 2.0”.

“It’s a really good question and probably beyond the scope of this conversation, but what I would say is that typically, what we have seen in the context of live service driven games at scale, is the Version 2 thing has almost never been as successful as the Version 1 thing,” Wilson responded.

“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 don’t have to give up the progress that they’ve made or the investment that they’ve put into the existing ecosystem.

“Any time we cause a global player community to have to choose between the investments they’ve made to date and future innovation creativity, that’s never a good place to put our community in, and so our objective will be to continue to innovate in the core experience, and you’re seeing that from season to season now as our seasons get progressively bigger and we’re changing kind of key modalities of play within those seasons.

“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 won’t believe we have to separate the experience in order to do so, but again, the team is working through this now.”