Yesterday, Apex Legends announced the free-to-play battle royale would embrace shrinkflationsplitting Season Battle Passes in half while players still pay roughly the same amount for them. Today, some loyal fans are calling it the last straw after months of other problems, and are threatening to never come back
“We’ve seen the numbers and things need to become more accessible and realistic for our global player community,” said a report from Electronic Arts blog post explanation of the changes. Instead of one 100-rank Battle Pass every three months for $10 in-game currency, there would be two 60-rank Battle Passes every six weeks, with no option to purchase them with in-game currency. “Each of these updated aspects allows us to make the Battle Pass more viable and more valuable for your time and money.”
But that’s not how players see it. Instead, the move is being interpreted as a greedy back pull that incentivizes players to grind harder each season, while charging the price of multiple new games per year if they want to maximize the rewards they earn for doing so. A tweet announcing the new plan has now been ratified with over 5,000 responses ranging from players calling the changes “terrible” to players threatening to leave the game altogether.
The meltdown is still going on at the Apex Legends subreddit too. “The BP changes finally did it. I removed it!” reads one of the most upvoted threads right now. “Now that the bp is actually going to cost money, the game is officially dead to me,” reads another“Okay guys, I’m leaving,” reads a third. “Thanks to all the strangers I played the game with,” the person wrote. “The game also introduced me to some cool people who are now my IRL buddies. Lots of memories made. This game was my drug during the pandemic.”
Some players ask each other to take a break and stop spending money on the game. Others ask if Apex Legends is dying while they complain server crashed, bugs after the update, stagnation of matchmakingand cheating because of Chronus Zen peripherals and other controller adapters. They feel like the damage has been done even if there is eventually a backlash over the new battle pass system and pricing. The negative reviews have also started to pile up on Steam, with over 1,000 posted on July 9th alone as Apex Legends gets a ‘mixed’ review on Valve’s store page.
Online players are always angry about something. And it’s often hard to distinguish between the loudest voices dominating a conversation that just a few fans are having and a real tipping point for a live service game’s community. But it’s clear that frustration has built up in the Apex Legends community for months. The battle pass controversy may have only served to illuminate a growing malaise that already existed among players.
Steam’s concurrent numbers, which are far from a perfect picture of the health of an online multiplayer game, have been declining for some time now. Apex Legends is still one of the most played games on PC, but it’s far from over 600,000 concurrent players peak since January 2023, and has not been as low as its current figure of 260,000 since December 2021. The game also regularly featured in the monthly top 10 most played lists for Steam and console, provided by research firm Circana, but has dropped off since november from last yearIn June it was only the 16th most played game on both PlayStation and Xboxaccording to Circana.
Nothing sums up the current meaning Apex Legends can drift better than the march esports debaclewhen someone managed to hack an official tournament and completely derail it. The event was postponed “because the competitive integrity of this series was at risk”, with the person responsible claiming that he had done it for funThe . Apex Legends team worked on quickly implement solutionsbut the example is exemplary of the feeling some players have that the game needs a major reset.
“It’s been 5 years and I still get kicked out of matches because servers aren’t working properly,” one fan recently wrote on the subreddit in response to a viral thread on what needed to be done to bring players back who had dropped out. “My friends and I keep trying to queue together, but we keep getting errors. The gameplay is phenomenal, but everything feels like it’s barely holding together. The prices Apex charges for cosmetics make it seem like a luxury, but it can’t even do the basic things like squadding up with friends and detecting cheaters.”