Apex Legends and Star Wars: Jedi Dev Respawn Cancels Another Incubation Project, Lays Off Unknown Number of Individuals
Apex Legends and Star Wars: Jedi Dev Respawn Cancels Another Incubation Project, Lays Off Unknown Number of Individuals - IGN
From Jeff Grubb:
To clarify, I've been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year's February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don't know the exact number.
But yeah, I'm sure continuing to chase live service as though you'll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.
EDIT: furthermore, he says:
Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.
Imagine making billions (with an S) off of one game and still calling it a miss. Chasing infinite growth is so dumb.
In chasing infinite growth (of the same game), you have potentially infinite spend as well.
Exactly, it's an awful treadmill. EA as a whole was at nearly 60% profit last year. Coupled with layoffs, it seems they're trying to keep that infinite spend as potential as possible lol
I just hope something good comes out of recent ex-rspn teams.
Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren't as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.
Recently, Clair Obscur told another story of ex-publisher success. So far, we only know of the review success and I don’t actually know if it’s a financial success.
If it is, I can only hope it leads to some investor understanding in just how done the world is of lottery-planning in the game world; seeing one victory, and having every single publisher chase it.
They sold 1 million copies in a couple of days on top of a Game Pass deal, and their team is leaner than most. They're surely financially successful.
I remember Apex Legends being pretty fun when it came out; did something happen or was it just EA being EA?
They'd gotten especially cash grabby since I had started playing and then they disabled Linux and Steam Deck compatibility using them as the scapegoats for their inability to fix their shitty anti-cheat. News flash, there's still a bunch of cheaters because the cheats are made for Windows players.
Controller aim assist is too much of an aimbot which made all the russians turn their hacks on and it's just controllers vs cheaters and some nolifers in this game these days, not fun at all for most casual players
Afaik they're still using awful third-party servers, lag compensation is still aggressive as fuck, they tried to "fix" visibility by slapping a bandaid in the form of healthbars, and the anticheat thing was another bandaid instead of a surgery. Overall it's kinda stuck, all of the old issues are still there.
They have a shitload of new cosmetics though, if that's your jam. Funnily enough, they were so greedy even esport orgs didn't want to keep working with them. Rspn offered a one-time payment, orgs wanted a percentage of sales. Mind you, it's a fairly big esport that advertises the game for them (btw played on better servers than available in-game).
They overtuned controller aim assist to the point that 99% of pros swapped to it to remain competitive.
The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.
Unless youre either League or Fortnite, your game is going to go to the wayside. Except Fortnite seems to be declining
League is too.
I'm still playing it and it's still pretty fun. Seems to be a controversial take but I do like that they're constantly changing mechanics since I don't really take the game seriously.