Apex Legends Twitch numbers are going down. Does this necessarily mean the game is dying? What does Respawn Entertainment need to do to save the game?
Is Apex Legends is Dying?
Apex Legends came onto the battle royale scene in style. The game offered a new fresh look that no other battle royale game offered. On February 4, 2019, Apex Legends was released, and within one week the game gained 12 million players. Within a month, 50 million players. The game broke records set forth by Fortnite. Apex Legends was looking like it was going to be the Fortnite killer. The game’s success was not expected even from Respawn Entertainment.
The game got very good reviews in the beginning. However, there were several problems. The game system as a design was very interesting. A Legends based Battle Royale game was never done before. But this created more problems in the end.
Server Problems
Apex Legends started out with bad server connections. Many players thought this issue was due to the game being new. However, even though it improved, it was a very small improvement. The net code problems are still there. Therefore several players dropped the game and started to wait for better servers and fixed the netcode. But many players who dropped never returned because of the bad reputation that the game started to get.
Balance Issues
As a Legend based combat players expected more balanced characters. However, this did not happen. Most of the players dropped several legends because of their big hitboxes caused them problems even though their abilities were good. Respawn tried to solve this issue by adding a %10 health boost to Gibraltar and Caustic in Patch 1.1.1. But this did not solve the issue. So the game started to be played between several heroes.
No Solo, No Duo
Apex Legends was created as a 3 player team game, and this created another problem. The reason behind this was simple, this was a Legends based game. Therefore some Legends would be used more in a solo match. However, when Season 1 was released, many players were hoping for a solo and duo mode. Unfortunately, Respawn never added them in the new season.
As well, most of the players prefer playing solo than playing with other people. But Apex Legends forced these players to play with completely unknown players, especially ones with no mics. Therefore another problem rises up. Squads with mics had a huge advantage over the ones who did not have mics. Although this is entirely on the player’s end, it definitely made playing Apex a lot harder.
Cheater Problems
But probably the biggest problem was Apex Legends cheating problem. Several people even made videos on how easy was to cheat in the game. Apex Legends anti-cheat was a joke. In the end, Respawn first banned 16,000 accounts later the number rose to 350,000. Now they shave stated that they have banned over 1 million accounts. This meant a considerable amount of people were using cheats. Players were able to notice this because Apex Legends TTK was very long, when an opponent does not miss any shots on you, you start to understand something is not right.
Marketing Boom
Apex Legends marketing was done horribly. The reason was simple. They have paid several big names to play their game. Ninja allegedly got 1 million USD to play Apex Legends. This created a problem for the unforeseen future. One by one, these streamers went back to their original games and simply did not play Apex Legends anymore. So viewers follower suit. This was a marketing mistake. The game was already free. Although not all of the streamers that Respawn chose to market the game left (Shroud for example), choosing fly-by streamers definitely caused the early boom.
However, with all this said, is Apex Legends dying? Shroud doesn’t think so. Additionally, Respawn Entertainment has dedicated teams for the game, so they haven’t abandoned the game at all. So what can Respawn do reverse the declining trend?
5 Things Respawn Entertainment Needs to Do
We wrote an article a while back which still holds true now. There are several things that Respawn can do to reverse the downtrend.
- Continue to Innovate
- Keep Updates Fresh
- Continue The Fight Against Hacking and Cheating
- Create More Events for the Game
- Expand Team / Hire top Talent
Although the latter is easier said than done, what really brought Apex Legends to the forefront was the talented developers and designers that worked on the game in the first place. Additionally, if Apex Legends can focus on pushing out a new Season that includes many new features for players, this will help propel Apex Legends back to the top and increase not only their viewership but retaining their current user base as well as bringing back players who left.
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