Apex Legends Mobile has now passed $40m in lifetime earnings eight months after its worldwide launch, according to Appmagic data.
But with revenue dropping off badly, a new season of content delayed and fans complaining, EA has work to do if the hero shooter is to be a long-term success on mobile.
[EDIT, 31/1/23: The day after this story was published, EA announced it would be closing Apex Legends Mobile. Report here. EA boss Andrew Wilson also explained the decision to investors. Our original report continues below.]
A key exec just left the team, too. Respawn’s head of product management Giovanni Ducati, who is responsible for Apex Legends Mobile, has taken up a role with Warner Bros as VP and studio head at the developer of Game of Thrones: Conquest. Ducati is a former director of product management at Scopely, and prior to that was senior director at Blizzard.
Apex Legends Mobile’s overall revenue and download trends aren’t great, either. Most notably there’s been a very sudden revenue drop in the last week – average revenue per day based on the last seven days is around $23k, and it was $43k the week prior.
Monthly earnings hit $7m in May and June 2022, but have since declined to around half that. October, November and December revenue came to $3.6m, $2.9m and $3.5m respectively. January is tracking to reach just over $1.4m, a steep decline and an all-time low.
Earnings have been down every week since the start of the year. The last four weeks’ revenue has been $485k, $389k, $299k and $161k last week.
Daily downloads peaked at 1.77m on May 18 2022, and bounced between around 80-120k throughout June and July. Since passing 100k daily downloads in August, there’s been a steady decline. Based on the last 30 days, it now gets around 40k downloads per day on average.
From a monthly downloads point of view, it got 1.5m in October, 1.3m in November and 1.4m in December. The data for this month only goes up to January 29, but it’ll likely reach under 1.2m.
EA ran a free-to-play weekend over Christmas in which all legends were free and players got double XP all weekend, which got good results. But on January 5 the company announced that the new season of the game has been delayed by “a few weeks to address some bugs that popped up over the break.”
The current season, dubbed Underworld, has been running since November 30. A quick glance at what the player community is saying on Twitter, Reddit and Discord doesn’t paint a great picture either. There are some serious complaints about bugs, cheaters, long waits to enter matches and more, in addition to questions over the game’s lack of new content.
Apex Legends Mobile was crowned game of the year by both Apple and Google in December 2022. We also interviewed Apex Legends Mobile codeveloper Lightspeed Studios last summer.
We’ve asked EA for comment on the status of Apex Legends Mobile and will report back should the company respond.
