Apex Legends is slipping quite considerably, at least in terms of revenue, according to new figures for April, indicating that the game only made a fraction of the amount it did during the first month.
According to SuperData, a gaming-focused analytics firm (and Nielson company), in April, Apex Legends managed to make $24 million, which is down ‘significantly’ for the second month running.
Indeed, that figure is only just over a quarter of what the battle royale shooter made in its launch month, where it racked up $92 million in revenue and SuperData praised it as the best launch of a free-to-play game ever.
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The drop in revenue also means that Apex Legends is no longer in the top rankings of PC and console games as compiled by the analytics company. So in short, on the fiscal front, things aren’t looking so peachy, at least going by this report (and that’s all we can go by at the moment).
That said, we knew that the huge momentum generated by the surprise launch – and the clever backing EA secured from major Twitch streamers – was never going to last.
However, revenue has perhaps dipped a bit too fast, and too far, for the publisher and developer to remain comfortable here.
Reasons to be fearful?
Why has this happened? There have been lots of potential reasons and complaints bounced around the internet here and there, that’s for sure.
Some of the major moans have been about persistent bugs, particularly the likes of crashes happening repeatedly to PC gamers in the earlier days, and most recently audio quirks. Along with other issues like hit-box woes and criticism of the game’s net code, plus problems with cheaters (although the latter is hardly anything new in online gaming, and Respawn has certainly been trying to tackle this).
Perhaps the bigger beef, though, is criticism of the Season 1 Battle Pass not offering enough additional content, interesting rewards or incentives for progression. Not to mention cries of only one map not being enough.
Although personally, we don’t have a problem with this, and are quite happy to be ‘stuck’ with just the one map – and indeed happy with the game overall, for that matter.
Whatever we might think, a lot of niggling has been going on, and we’ve even heard top streamers like Ninja point out the reputational damage being done to Apex Legends, creating this perception that it’s a failing, dwindling game – when, at its core, Apex gets so many of the fundamental shooter mechanics right (certainly for us, anyway: the pace, movement, just the overall feel, really).
Sadly, this latest piece of financial news won’t do anything to detract from the aforementioned negative perception.
We can but hope that things stabilize from here, and that Season 2 can make more of an impact, but there is perhaps one major move that Respawn/EA could make right away, potentially – and that would be to lower the price of in-game content.
The exorbitant asking prices put on the likes of skins have long been a thorn in players’ sides, and this is certainly a justifiable complaint. Lowering the cost of in-game goodies to a more palatable level might well encourage a great deal more purchasing activity, thus driving greater revenue by volume of sales – and this seems to us like a rather obvious trick which is being missed.
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Via Dot Esports
