yesterday, Apex Legends announced the free battle royale will embrace shrinking inflation, splitting Season Battle Passes in half while still charging players roughly the same amount for them. Today, some longtime fans are calling it the last straw after months of other issues and threatening to never return
“We’ve seen the numbers, and things need to be more accessible and realistic for our global player community,” reads Electronic Arts blog post explaining the changes. Instead of one 100-rank Battle Pass every three months for $10 in-game currency, there will 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 accessible and valuable for your time and money.”
But the players don’t see it that way. Instead, the move has been interpreted as a greedy rug-pulling that forces players to grind even harder each season, while charging them the price of multiple new games per year if they want to maximize the rewards earned for doing so. A tweet announcing the new plan it has since been matched with over 5,000 responses, which range from players calling the changes “terrible” to threats to quit the game entirely.
The crash continues on Apex Legends subreddit too. “The changes at BP have finally done it. I uninstalled!” reads one of the most voted topics at the moment. “Now that bp will cost real money the game is officially dead to me,” reads another. “Okay guys, I’m going out” read third. “Thanks to all the strangers I’ve played the game with,” the person wrote. “The game also introduced me to some cool people who are now my IRL friends. Many memories were made. This game was my drug during the pandemic.”
Some players are begging each other to take a break and stop spending money on the game. Others ask if Apex Legends dies as they complain server crashes, errors after update, stagnation matchmakingand infidelity due to Chronus Zen Peripherals and other controller adapters. They feel like the damage is done even if there is an eventual rollback of the new battle pass and pricing system. Negative reviews started piling up on Steam as well, with over 1000 posted on July 9th alone like Apex Legends receives a “mixed” rating on Valve’s storefront.
Online players are always upset about something. And it’s often hard to tell the difference between the loudest voices dominating a conversation that only a few fans are having and the true inflection point for the live game community. But it’s clear that there is frustration brewing in the Apex Legends community for months now. If anything, the battle pass controversy may have only served to crystallize a growing malaise that already exists among players.
The number of concurrent games on Steam—by no means a perfect picture of the state of online multiplayer gaming—has been declining for some time. However Apex Legends is still one of the most played games on PC, it is far from over 600,000 concurrent players peak since January 2023 and has not been as low as the current number of 260,000 as of December 2021. The game was also regularly in the monthly top 10 of the most played lists for Steam and console provided by research firm Circana, but has drop out since November from last year. In June, it was only the 16th most played game on both PlayStation and Xboxaccording to Circana.
Nothing sums up the current sense Apex Legends can be worn better than his eSports fiasco in March, when someone managed to hack an official tournament and completely screw it up. The event was postponed “due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised”, the person responsible claimed to have done so just for fun. The Apex Legends team works for rapid deployment of fixesbut the example is emblematic of the feeling some players have that the game needs a bigger reset.
“It’s been 5 years and I’m still getting kicked out of matches due to server errors,” one fan recently wrote on the subreddit in response to a viral thread about what needs to happen to get dropped players back. “My friends and I keep trying to queue up but keep getting errors. The gameplay is phenomenal, but everything else feels like it’s barely held together. The highest prices for cosmetics show that it is a luxury, but it cannot provide even the basics like gathering teams with friends and properly detecting cheats.
