EA will expand Apex Legends "beyond the traditional battle royale universe" with new ways to play

Even as they cancel games and carry out mass layoffs, EA see sunny skies ahead for Respawn's free-to-play battle royale shooter Apex Legends, with CEO Andrew Wilson outlining plans to "expand beyond the traditional battle royale universe".

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday (ta, VGC), Wilson hailed the shooter's "hundreds of millions of players" to date and prophesied "incredible growth" while gingerly acknowledging that Apex Legends isn't quite the barn-storming concurrent-player success story it once was.

"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."

EA's dark designs for building on that success over the next 5-10 years begin with making Apex Legends easier to get into, followed by adding new ways to play Apex, and then shoving the game into different markets around the world - truly, a cadence worthy of any cackling Bond villain.

"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," Wilson 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."

Titled Apex Legends: Breakout, the game's 20th season introduced new progression and MOBA-style elements which hardware editor James Archer described as "exciting and genuinely game-changing - if a little scary at the same time."

We can expect more in that vein, Wilson promised. "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," he said. "The third phase will be, how do we really think about broader culturalisation? There are so many markets, particularly in Europe and though Asia, where we just haven't broken through yet."

If you are like me and James Archer, you may be reading all this and thinking "but whither Titanfall?" As is increasingly hard to remember, Apex Legends began life as a spin-off from Respawn's previous, mech-loving campaign-and-multiplayer shooters. Alas, when James asked Respawn's narrative lead Ashley Reed recently if there were any plans for a Titanfall 3, her response was sympathetic but not hugely encouraging.

Still, some kind of Titanfally singleplayer functionality might agree with EA's desire to make Apex Legends more approachable. You know what FPS campaigns are good for, EA? Providing a safe space in which people can learn how to play the dang thing so that they don't get absolutely minced in multiplayer.