Post Script

Apex Legends isn’t just a masterclass in battle-royale design. It’s a triumph of marketing too

There are no real secrets in videogames any more. Someone, somewhere, is always in the know, and often only too happy to share. The videogame press may not be in the business of spoiling a company’s impending announcements, having decided some time ago that it didn’t want to stand in the way of the hype train, but it loves a good gossip as much as any other profession. And so, in the handful of days between EA flying select influencers, #content creators and online media to the US to play Apex Legends and it being announced and released, more than half a dozen separate sources got in touch to ask if we were aware of it.

We were not, and neither seemingly was anyone else, which is some achievement. It is remarkable enough that EA managed to convince Respawn to shelve the apparently in-development Titanfall 3 and pivot to the hottest genre in town without the news leaking out – particularly since a number of Respawn staff moved over to Infinity Ward last year, seemingly in response to the decision. It is even more remarkable that Respawn managed to get the game to version 1.0, ready for launch, with neither press nor public getting even a sniff of it.

This cannot have been easy for EA either, and it is to the publisher’s great credit that it elected to keep Apex Legends under wraps until it was ready for launch. It is tremendously active on the promo circuit, especially now it runs its own event, EA Play, alongside E3. Its press conference last June was not so much a damp squib as a sopping wet one, and it must have been tempting to sneak in the news that the Titanfall folks were making a battle royale. The timing of the game’s release was certainly canny, coming days before a set of disappointing quarterly financial results, caused by Battlefield V selling less than forecast. Apex’s immediate success – soaring to the top of the Twitch charts, unseating Fortnite, and reaching 10 million players inside 72 hours – more than made up for the resulting drop in EA’s share price. We often give EA a rough ride in these pages, and deservedly so. Yet it equally deserves praise in this instance for recognising that, just as battle royale games have defied established convention – buggy, roughshod games somehow becoming the most popular titles on the planet – so too must their marketing. Indeed, the couple of days between Apex Legends’ existence leaking and its release make clear that EA made the right decision. On forums and social media, the game was instantly written off, and understandably so – as we observe in our review, a written description of Apex Legends is far from flattering. A muddy screengrab started doing the rounds, and the game was damned still further.

The reaction over those days shows the logic behind Respawn and EA’s thinking, finely put by Drew McCoy, one of the producers. “We’re doing a free-to-play game, with essentially loot boxes, after we were bought by EA, and it’s not Titanfall 3,” he told Eurogamer. “It’s the perfect recipe for a marketing plan to go awry. So why have that? Let’s just ship the game and let players play.”

The game industry’s big players, EA included, have come to appreciate the value of a ‘shadow drop’, a game announced for immediate release during a stage show. Yet Apex Legends is the biggest game to date to be released in this manner. It’s the easiest thing in the world for a publisher to release some earnest little indie thing it has funded for a relative pittance, but a game of Apex Legends’ pedigree and production values can expect to be in the spotlight for far longer. Yet lest we forget that one day, Fortnite’s battle-royale component simply came to exist; it was announced the day it became available, and both saw immediate success. This is no accident. Indeed, it may be the only way to market a battle royale.

How would EA build and sustain buzz for Apex Legends had it announced the game at EA Play last June? It has one map and one mode, which is simply not suited to the steady drip-drip of information with which most contemporary big-budget games are promoted. Battlefield V, you may remember, is getting a battle royale mode. It was announced, funnily enough, at E3 last year. It is due for release this spring. Any buzz it previously had – and we are not aware of much – has now evaporated.

Indeed, if there’s one misstep EA has made, it’s what Apex Legends has done, and may yet do, to the publisher’s own release slate. BFV’s battle-royale mode, Firestorm, is one casualty, at least for now. And launching a free-toplay online shooter barely a fortnight before a paid-for one feels like quite the vote of no confidence in Anthem and BioWare. EA has form for this, infamously putting Respawn’s own Titanfall 2 up against that year’s COD and Battlefield instalments. Supposedly the developer itself had lobbied for the chance to go up against Activision’s FPS juggernaut: Respawn was founded by the heads of Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward. But it lost, as EA surely knew it would. The outlook for Anthem was already bleak after a miserably handled January demo. It is now at risk of drowning in Apex Legends’ wake.

EA remains resolutely hard to read, then – and its successful handling of Apex Legends in no way means it has finally cracked this marketing lark and will never make a mistake again (ask BioWare). But it saw that this very different kind of genre requires a very different promotional approach. And as its game sits at the summit of the Twitch charts, breaking engagement records at a rate of knots, it is clear it has executed on its strategy perfectly. Perhaps most importantly it has given Respawn – until now the underappreciated jewel in EA’s crown – the spell in the spotlight it has long deserved.

It is to the publisher’s great credit that it elected to keep Apex Legends under wraps until it was ready for launch