Apex Legends Mobile made its initial release on May 17, 2022 and almost a year later, the battle royale mobile game shut down. Electronic Arts announced they would not be cancelling any development on Battlefield Mobile or Apex Legends Mobile back in February of 2023. However, after a ten percent decline in Electronic Arts share prices, an abundance of discussion was triggered by the company suddenly cutting one of their biggest hits.
It is stated on the Electronic Arts Apex Legends Mobile webpage, “At Respawn, we aim to provide players with games that are consistently outstanding. Following a strong start, the content pipeline for Apex Legends Mobile has begun to fall short of that bar for quality, quantity, and cadence. It is for this reason, after months of working with our development partner, that we have made the mutual decision to sunset our mobile game. Although disappointing, we are proud of the game we launched, are grateful for the support of the Apex Legends community, and are confident that this is the right decision for players.”
Since then, certain revelations surrounding the title began to surface. Discussions of the potential difficulty of Apex Legends Mobile having to compete with Call of Duty: Mobile in which the latter always seemed to be leagues ahead. Furthermore, the popularity of Fortnite made the competition between the plethora of battle royale titles increasingly more intense amongst all platforms.
Apex Legends Mobile started off as a strong title. It offered players the feature of third-person mode which became nearly exclusive to that title and it garnered the title of Apple’s and Google’s game of 2022. The mobile game even surpassed thirteen million dollars in revenue and generated twenty-two million downloads in the first month of its launch. However, its popularity decreased with time and did not give players incentive to return to the title after being invested in Apex Legends Mobile for a few months or so.
In fact, Apex Legends Mobile’s latest update included the release of their new Legend, Ballistic, that did not resonate with fans very well. Players were disappointed by the character’s “Smart Bullet” tactical that lowered an enemy’s defense and overheated their weapons causing immense damage to both the player and their weapon. The ability did not have any feasible way of avoiding it, so Ballistic was deemed overpowered and caused many players to drop the game due to their inclusion.
As of May 1st, the game will no longer be available for download on the Electronic Arts web store or on any third-party stores. Accounts associated with the game will not receive any refunds in regards to in-game purchases and players are encouraged to spend all in-game currency before the servers cut off at 4 p.m. PDT.