Electronic Arts has announced that its mobile versions of Apex Legends and Battlefield are shutting down in an interesting shock. In fact, Apex Legends Mobile has been around for less than a year only.
Apex Legends Mobile will be playable from now until May 1, 2023 at 4 PM PST. After that, the game will no longer be playable. Battlefield Mobile had been in development and no release date was provided for it, but EA said that all development will cease. The studio behind Battlefield Mobile, Industrial Toys, will be shutting down completely.
In a statement, EA explained why Apex Legends Mobile is shutting down, stating that “the ongoing experience was not going to meet the expectations of our players.
“After months of working with our development partner, we have made the mutual decision to sunset the mobile game.
“We’ve also made the decision to stop the development of the current Battlefield mobile title…we decided to pivot from the current direction to best on our vision for the franchise and to meet the expectations of our players.”
On an earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that the company has plans to “reimagine a connected Apex Mobile experience in the future.”
It seems to indicate that Apex Legends may return to the mobile world without Lightspeed Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent and the makers of PUBG Mobile.
Wilson Gives More Specific Reasons
CEO Andrew Wilson gave more specific reasons as to why Apex Legends Mobile is shuttering. The first reason was related to gameplay:
“There is a level of complexity to Apex gameplay in particular which is very much what Apex is about — verticality of gameplay and team-based gameplay — that didn’t translate quite as well to mobile devices as we had hoped. I think we learned a great deal from that.”
Wilson said that Apex Legends Mobile was unable to “retain the more visual user at the rate that we needed it to, and in a game that relies a lot on team play and competitive play, liquidity of the overall player base is really, really important as you think about the future experience for players over time.”
Wilson then added that the mobile market is challenging and that players are constantly changing. He also added that “the biggest new launches that are seeing the most success are the ones that are deeply connected to the broader franchise where there’s not always cross-play but certainly cross-progression and the feeling that they’re part of a single unified community and a single unified game experience.”
The Future of Battlefield Mobile
Andrew Wilson stated that EA believed that Battlefield Mobile would “run into some of the same challenges” as Apex Legends Mobile did.
“Rather than continue to push against that, we wanted to come back, take a breath, reset, and really think about the broader franchise strategy and allow the leadership to build a true cross-platform immersive game experience around a reimagined Battlefield in the future.”
EA is continuing to work on Battlefield 2042 and is in pre-production on future Battlefield games. Back in September, EA revealed that Halo veteran Marcus Lehto would be leading Ridgeline Games to develop new Battlefield narrative campaigns.
Apex Legends Mobile has been removed from existing storefronts and all real money in-app purchases will be disabled. However, players can spend existing Syndicate Gold and continue playing until May 1.
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