The Missed Opportunity – Apex Legends Mobile: The EA title which failed to bring profit to survive

Apex Legends Mobile, the Electronic Arts (EA) title had a lot of interest initially from fans who were excited that such a popular PC franchise has had its mobile port. We at GamingonPhone even awarded the best mobile port by the GamingonPhone 2022 Awards in its year of release. But despite the initial interest from battle-royale fans in Apex Legends Mobile, the game was eventually discontinued in May 2023, after an official announcement in February 2023. Let us discover why Apex Legends Mobile, despite having so much potential and being a good mobile port was a missed opportunity from the publisher, as well as the gaming space.

In the world of games which was slowly entering an age of cross-platform, the same game had started to appear together on PC, consoles, and mobiles. EA had already begun to participate quite early in this race, with FIFA Mobile, Madden Mobile, and Sims Mobile being very popular among the fans.

In this piece, we will discuss the various factors why Apex Legends Mobile failed, the whole story behind its downfall along why it has been a missed opportunity from EA to tap into the engaged battle-royale audience who are missing the innovations from the likes of PUBG Mobile, Free Fire and others.

Apex Legends Mobile: Initial Prospects Despite Few Criticisms

Apex Legends Mobile, though relatively quite new, looked like a decent take on the famous PC game, Apex Legends. Although the initial response was not close to the popularity of these cult classics, it needs to be remembered that the title was only a year old.

Additionally, there will be always a yardstick for comparison for the mobile port, which is its PC counterpart, Apex Legends. The developers at Electronic Arts had implemented the shooting and gameplay mechanics in the touch controls of a mobile game. A few good points for Apex Legends Mobile created a small fanbase in the gaming community, but could not lure more players from its counterparts.

The whole picture of the free-to-play gaming ecosystem

The game was deemed as a great mobile port for the PC version, with a great pool of heroes and maps from the original PC game, along with some impressive graphics and control customizations. However, there were some downsides, particularly, some technical performance issues at the start and matchmaking problems. In all, it was a promising adaptation, but there was a lot of room for refinement.

One of the major problems which the makers realized in the subsequent months after its release, is the low demand for the heavy monetization elements in the game. These elements such as in-game cosmetics or skins do not generally affect the gameplay, but come as a source of revenue for the publisher. With the recent popularity of Free-to-play games in the mobile gaming ecosystem, gamers might be either teenagers or people from different areas of the world, where PC and gaming console isn’t standard.

Therefore, people paying for the game would be far-fetched. On the contrary, the Apex Legends Mobile developer team had to work on pushing updates, keeping the servers online, and working on the game’s progress, despite making very little money in the process. Therefore, there came a drastic step of the announcement of its shutdown before completing its first anniversary.

Apex Legends Mobile: Revenue figures owing to its shutdown

Respawn Entertainment’s Head of Product Management Giovanni Ducati, who was responsible for Apex Legends Mobile, had taken up a role with Warner Bros as VP and Studio Head at the developer of Game of Thrones: Conquest. Ducati is a former director of product management at Scopely, and before that was a senior director at Blizzard.

Looking at the revenue report from AppMagic, the monthly gross earnings had hit $7m in May and June 2022. But, it has since declined to around half that. In October, November, and December 2022, the revenue came to $3.6m, $2.9m and $3.5m, respectively. In January 2023, the revenue has just tracked to reach just over $1.4m, a steep decline and an all-time low.

Earnings have been down every week since the start of the year. The last four weeks’ revenue has been $485k, $389k, $299k, and $161k last week. This came as a final nail to the coffin, after which the official shutdown announcement came.

On February 1, 2023, Electronic Arts decided to scrap the development of both Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile. As a part of the blog post, they mentioned that the “content pipeline for Apex Legends Mobile has started to fall short of that bar for quality, quantity, and cadence.” The formal shutdown of the server took place on May 1st, 2023.

Final Aftermath

Apex Legends Mobile offered a unique blend of hero-shooter mechanics and high-paced action, which could have challenged the popular dominance of PUBG Mobile, Free Fire, and COD Mobile. If Respawn and EA had prioritized aggressive optimization, innovation, and player-centric systems, it could have shaken up the dominance of PUBG Mobile, Free Fire, and COD Mobile.

The whole project of Apex Legends Mobile can be termed a missed opportunity from EA who failed to serve the mobile battle-royale fans who deserved a gem in the stagnated repetitiveness of these titles.

Read the overviews of 2024 from the following articles:

• GamingonPhone’s Year in Review 2024
• GamingonPhone’s Mobile Esports Year in Review 2024
• The Biggest Mobile Gaming Disappointments of 2024

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