EA says Apex Legends will ‘expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe’ this year

Apex Legends players can expect to start seeing the game “expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe” over the coming year as Electronic Arts looks to attract more players to the franchise.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday, EA CEO Andrew Wilson outlined a plan which he believes can lead to “incredible growth” for Respawn’s live service game, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in February.

Wilson said Apex Legends is one of the most successful new game IP launches of the last 10-15 years, having built a community of “hundreds of millions of players” with an enviable churn rate.

“If you’re thinking about streaming services which are dealing with 40% and 50% churn, we’ve got a core community in Apex that has 75% retention over the course of a five-year period – it’s an incredible franchise,” he said.

“But in the growth of franchises, we do see ebbs and flows, and where we’ve gotten to with Apex, is we’ve got that first cohort of community that have been with us now for five years, and it’s big, it’s large, it’s global and it’s deeply engaged.”

Wilson went on to discuss EA’s strategy for growing the franchise over the next 5-10 years. Initially, this will be focused on making the game more accessible, and after that, more culturally relevant to different markets.

“It’s an incredible game, it’s a core game, it’s not for the faint of heart when you come into it, and that’s part of its charm and part of why people love it,” he said. “But job number one for us is, how do we make that a little more new player friendly? And that’s what you’re starting to see, you’re starting to see it with Season 20, which is really built around how do we drive more acquisition and more engagement.

“And I would say the early signs of that have been very promising. We’re starting to see numbers that are more like the numbers that we’d seen at the peak.”

“Apex Legends: Breakout is the most fluid, fast-paced, and rewarding the game has felt in years by focusing on simplicity and removing as many barriers to shooting other players as possible,” we said of the game’s latest season, which launched in February.

“The next phase will then be, how do we think about more modalities of play, how do you expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe? And we’ll start to see that in the coming year,” Wilson said.

“The third phase will be, how do we really think about broader culturalisation? There are so many markets, particularly in Europe and though Aisa, where we just haven’t broken through yet.

“There’s incredible appetite, there’s an incredible receptiveness towards the IP, and we just haven’t broken through with acquisition, engagement and monetisation yet.

“And so as we think about that on a go forward basis, as you make it more new user friendly, as you start to add more things to do in the world, expand the modalities of play, and you start to meaningfully culturalise those around the world in markets that we haven’t even scratched the surface on yet, we think there’s incredible growth for the future.”

VGC recently asked three Respawn developers what they think the next five years holds for Apex Legends.

“It’s just going to keep growing in my mind. It’s going to keep evolving. The Apex today won’t be the same as the Apex in five years,” said Mike Renner, a game design director at the studio. “We’ll look at ourselves, and we’ll look at competitors and how they’ve solved issues, and keep building on the genre as a whole.”

“To echo Mike, I think all we want is to see it continue to grow,” said lead battle royale designer Josh Mohan. “I want Apex in five years to be a place for everybody. “I think sometimes we can get a reputation for being a very hard, competitive game, and I want that to remain at its core, but I also want the game to be a large space to entice more people to come and join in.”

Lead Legends designer Devan McGuire said: “I want the game to be strong and competitive and I want to find the meta at some point. That would be my ideal. The game is considered pretty hard, and I think some way to make the game more approachable over the next five years would be great. We want a more approachable game for a wider group of people to come in and find success more frequently.”

At the Morgan Stanley conference on Wednesday, Wilson also outlined the transformative impact he believes generative AI can have on EA and the wider games business over the next five years.

EA’s boss said advancements in the technology are allowing the company to create richer, more personalised content increasingly rapidly.

Greater efficiency coupled with more immersive experiences will lead to significant audience expansion over the coming years and provide a “multi-billion dollar” growth opportunity, he said.