Apex Legends Revenue Down 74%

This might fall a bit into “a piece of our minds” op-ed territory, but I think it’s important even if the news itself is rather straightforward.

For the first time since launch, Apex Legends – once a strong contender for the Battle Royale crown – has actually dropped in revenue. On top of being less streamed than ever before on Twitch, it’s now generating less money for Respawn Games. Sure, it still earned the company a cool $24 million in April on both consoles and PC, according to SuperData, but that revenue actually down a whopping 74 percent since the game launched.

This can be blamed on a number of things. Specifically, both the relatively recently launched season pass and the cosmetics for the game have been criticized by fans for being rather lackluster, so it could simply be a case of there being nothing worthwhile to spend money on. Plus, the longer the game is out, the higher the average player level is going to be: once you hit a certain level (around 50 or so) you basically stop unlocking free loot chests, and without that constant stream of content to remind you why cosmetics are cool it can be hard to remember to care – which, to their credit, is one of the more brilliant strategies employed by Blizzard’s Overwatch.

But I worry that probably the biggest reason why the game is falling out of favor is that it simply can’t keep pace with Epic Game’s own Fortnite, which I’ll remind you is only capable of pulling off a constant stream of updates and new content because they keep their studio in a state of never-ending crunch, while the Apex Legend team is trying hard to avoid that. And I worry that if this downward trend continues, the Apex Legends management will make the decision to employ a similarly destructive model.

Which is the last thing we need…