Daily Archives: August 19, 2019

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Apex Legends Developers are today’s failure

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Holy shit, now that’s a meltdown

Now, for those who wonder what Apex Legends is, it is a so called “Battle Royale” video game, basically just a big open map with a whole bunch of player, either solo or in teams, with the objective being delightfully simple.

Last player/team standing, everyone else must die, there’s various mechanics to ensure the whole game doesn’t end up with one player hiding in a corner, there’s a slowly decreasing play area, anyone caught outside get’s melted by video game magic or lasers or what have you.

Ever since Player Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG) released a buggy game, this has been the big thing the AAA publishers have been trying to get into, with various degrees of failure, Epic’s Fortnite is the present number one on the market, but everyone’s trying this. It’s MOBAs and MMOs all over again.

Now EA had Respawn Entertainment slam Apex Legends together to make a quick buck using existing assets from Titanfall 2, using existing assets to make games isn’t by any means a bad idea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was assembled out of re-skinned assets from Far Cry 3, so if you need something fast, this was the correct way to do it.

Nobody planned for Apex Legends to make gargantuan amounts of cash, just a nice little share of the market, however, with people being fatigued from playing PUBG or unwilling to handle the art style and player-base of Fortnite, Apex Legends was a solid contender with decent enough gameplay.

Until this happened:

And the reddit didn’t behave properly, not the usual echo chamber, when we are all with amazing alacrity, shown just what the business strategy is for Apex Legends monetization: Massive Whaling.

Whales being a video game term for big spenders, the gambling equivalent of a high roller, gamers who lack the self-control and spent small and sometimes LARGE fortunes on silly digital items and such nonsense.

Well, nice to see what they think about everyone, except the whales of course

Yeah, this isn’t the best way to communicate with your audience, on the other hand, it’s honest, the fucking hate everyone who doesn’t burn though 100+ US$ for a silly video game.

Wow, what the fuck?
There’s a whole bunch of these.

So? Why is all this going on? Simple, Apex Legends made about 150 million US$ in revenue for EA in their most recent quarter, that’s about 10% of the company’s total revenue, from one source, that definitely wasn’t planned to be this massively successful.

So what happened? Well, EA now have an interest in really getting the revenue up as far as possible, squeezing every single penny and cent out of the players as the possibly can, which is what they always do.

But not only that, when Respawn was bought by EA back in 2017, EA paid 151 million US$ in cash, that isn’t the noteworthy part, the second part of the price is: ” Up to $164 million in long-term equity in the form of restricted stock units for Respawn”

Obviously, we don’t have a clue how this equity would work, we have no clue what the restrictions are, however, what I can tell you with absolutely certainty: The Leadership of Respawn Entertainment has a really big stake in the company’s profitability, for it’s a fairly safe assumption, to presume that a significant element of the restrictions are based on earnings.

So of course the developer goes nuts, why wouldn’t he/she/it/they? That person might have a lot of money at stake, a lot of stress, a lot of greed.

Not it matters, nothing will come of this, everyone will forget it within a week or two.

And that is today’s failure.