Over 2024, Apex Legends showed the biggest drop in overall Steam concurrent players the game has ever seen. From a high of 470,696 in February 2024 to 140,830
nearly daily Apex player moving to Linux full time again now that many more games work with it (knowing Apex no longer works). It will suck, but fuck microsoft and good riddance EA.
Even before then, people were up in arms about several changes.
Me and one friend used to play regularly, but they just straight up removed duos for almost a year. Trying to integrate a random third player into our teamwork just didn't work, so we stopped playing.
By the time they added duos back, we'd lost interest.
They made several changes like that, and I'm fairly certain hundreds of thousands of players felt burned in similar ways. You can't just "temporarily" remove the reason your players stick around, and expect them to stick around.
I wish it was considered normal for games like this to die out. Trying to maintain your audience with new content every few months is unsustainable. Ideally these games would release with the content the designers intended, no more and no less, and they would slowly lose their less dedicated players.
That way the more dedicated players aren't frustrated by having to keep up with a rapidly changing game, and can just get better in peace. I would guess this wouldn't be profitable for a free to play game with micro-transactions. But, I have a crazy idea. Just charge for the game up front.
it was normal to have a point when your game dies out and you have to reinvest in designing the sequel version of it, or a spinoff. nowadays companies keep the same husk of a game running until the last sucker online stops dropping dollars for cosmetics.
Doing post release content can be good. It gives the devs a chance to do something after they are more familiar with the tools and what content players prefer.
Sure, but you can add like a handful of maps and weapons, to supplement the game with what it feels like it's missing, without having a plan to support the game with new stuff for years.
I feel there is a fundamental difference between games like Dwarf Fortress or survival games or even open world story-driven games getting new content though that allows players to explore different options when replaying the game and games like this where the game play loop is inherently short and people are somewhat forced to do the 'optimal strategy' whatever that happens to be at the time.
that’s sad. The game has awesome movement unlike any other. But if they don’t innovate, they will fade into obscurity. The bean counters at EA have wreaked havoc upon a sick game.
Check out The Finals! It has a lot of similar movement abilities. The maps are designed with verticality and fast traversal in mind, so it may scratch that itch for you.
Whenever this happens, people attribute it to some change or another, but I'm pretty sure it's basically just inevitable. If the company's income stream didn't depend on an ever-present player base, I'd even say it's normal and healthy.
I have around a thousand hours in apex and i uninstalled after not playing the past few months. The linux shit was lame but also I just don't like the changes to the battlepass and the changes to the crafters and sheilds. Love the way the game played a few seasons ago, shame really.