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Apex Legends may not have the 50 million monthly players that it launched with back in March, but it still has a huge audience. During a conference call with investors, publisher Electronic Arts confirmed that the battle royale shooter has 8 million-to-10 million weekly players.
It’s difficult to compare that to other games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, because that data is not publicly available. Regardless, Apex has a huge number of recurring fans showing up across PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It also gives EA and developer Respawn Entertainment a lot of potential to generate revenue from the free-to-play game. And the publisher made it clear that it intends to do exactly that.
Respawn just launched Season 2 for Apex Legends in early July. It features improved progression to encourage more players to spend money. Now, EA is already talking about what’s next. EA chief executive officer Andrew Wilson confirmed Respawn is working on Season 3. And it’s “even bigger” than Season 2.
Ten years of Apex Legends
Don’t expect Apex to come to an end any time soon, either.
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EA chief financial and operating officer Blake Jorgensen told an analyst that Apex Legends will continue operations for the next 10 years — maybe even longer. That’s not out of the ordinary for publishers like EA. It has had Star Wars: The Old Republic running for seven years already, for example.
But the publisher is also indicating that it has a lot of faith in both Respawn and the Apex Legends brand. It noted that it has other teams standing by to help Respawn build more content for the game as needed.
“We have a large team in DICE Los Angeles that can help with Apex if Respawn wants that,” said Jorgensen.
Apex is clearly EA’s new ace, so fans can likely expect a long-term relationship from the game if they want one.
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