EA is shutting down Apex Legends Mobile and halting development on Battlefield Mobile.
Apex Legends Mobile will be laid to rest on May 1, 2023, while Battlefield Mobile is being axed before it ever saw the light of day.
The company said Apex Legends Mobile has started to fall short of its “bar for quality and cadence” due to a myriad of factors, and that it’s concerned Battlefield Mobile would run into the same challenges.
According to Bloomberg sources, the demise of Battlefield Mobile will also result in the closure of developer Industrial Toys, which was acquired by EA in 2018 and had been working on the project.
Elaborating on the news during a recent earnings call, EA boss Andrew Wilson said that while the mobile iteration of Respawn’s team shooter started strongly—winning multiple awards and attracting new players—it struggled to retain and engage users in the long-term.
“This was a really good game built by really good teams, and it won game of year on both Apple and Android devices, which is an extraordinary achievement given the amount of games that are made,” said Wilson.
“But a couple of things also were true inside of that: One is, there is a level of immersion and complexity to Apex gameplay in particular, which is very much about what Apex is about, verticality of game play and team based play that didn’t translate quite as well to mobile devices as we had hoped.
“Second is, the game, while it really engaged the core deeply, and it actually attracted a lot of new users, which we think speaks volumes for the future success potential of the franchise, it didn’t retain the more casual user at the rate that we needed it to.”
Wilson said that, given Apex relies a lot on team play and competitive play, liquidity of the overall player base is “really, really important,” and that evidently became a huge concern for the publisher as it looked to the future.
As both Apex and Battlefield are sprawling shooters that require team-play, Wilson explained there’s a belief internally that Battlefield Mobile is “probably going to run with some of the same challenges.”
“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,” added Wilson, explaining why development on the mobile title is being halted.
Wilson said EA views its experience working on both projects as a huge learning opportunity, adding that the company now has the chance to “lean into two great franchises in a way that the mobile market is more aligned to for the future.”