Apex Legends to Expand Beyond Battle Royale, Seek Growth in New Regions in the Coming Year

Look for Apex Legends to begin to expand past just the traditional battle royale format in the coming year as part of an overall plan to grow the community and evolve the IP. 

This came fromElectronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, who spoke at the recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. Last week, Wilson announced a 5% reduction in EA’s overall workforce, and a refocus on growth for the company. The full announcements from EA overall also included a refocus on owned IP and expanding upon their biggest successes. This is where Apex Legends certainly comes in.

Apex Legends has been a big success for EA, with the live service game having come to its sixth season with a significant 75% player retention rate out of “hundred of millions”. Those are loyal players at a time when we’re used to seeing churn, as many dev teams across various genres have to contend with population shifts or declines that never quite rise up again. 

Citing the large global community and their loyalty as a jumping off point, he’s also talking about growth. “It’s a core game, it’s not for the faint of heart when you come into it, and that’s part of its charm and part of why people love it,” he says, before adding that one of their near-term goals is to make things a little friendlier to new players. Season 20, Breakout, is intentionally centered around driving growth and to make the game a little more welcoming, and its next phase is where we will start to see the roots of branching out take hold.

“How do we think about more modalities of play, how do you expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe?” Wilson says about phase two. Finally, phase three is going to include elements in pursuit of cracking markets they haven’t yet really broken though in. 

With its impressive retention rates, Respawn is at least starting from a good place while they plan how to expand on their game and try to work their magic in new regions.