EA says it now plans to launch a "bigger, more meaningful update" for Apex Legends, or "Apex 2.0," just months after downplaying the idea of a sequel. Last October, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that the latest season of "Apex Legends" failed to meet expectations, but that they were trying to improve the existing game experience through updates rather than planning to launch a complete 2.0 version.
At the time, he mentioned that for service-based games, "version 2.0 is almost never as successful as version 1.0."
However, during EA's earnings call on Tuesday, Wilson seemed to soften his tone. As player engagement in Apex Legends continues to decline, the executive admitted that "more meaningful updates" are needed and that the Apex Legends development team is hard at work planning them.
However, Wilson said that any major "Apex Legends" announcement will not be launched until the new "Battlefield" game is released, which is not planned to be released before April 2026.
"Apex Legends is arguably one of the greatest new games in our industry over the past decade and is beloved by its core player base. We have more than 200 million people playing the game. However, the franchise's business trajectory has not gone in the direction we expected.
We've been trying, tweaking, and testing a lot of things while also continuing to support the community. When we think about Apex Legends today, I really think about development centered around three core directions. "
"The first is how to continue to support the incredible community of tens of millions who play this game every day. That includes improving the quality of the game, anti-cheating, all the things that make the core experience great, as well as creating new content for that community."
He continued: "Phase two, and I think I've talked about it before, we do believe that we need a more meaningful update to Apex Legends as a broad gaming experience, and the team is working hard on that. As you can imagine, we may not launch this update at the same time as the Battlefield game launches. So from a timing perspective, our current thinking is that it will launch after Battlefield."
Wilson said that EA has proven its ability to create series of games that can be popular for decades, and "we expect "Apex Legends" to be one of them."
He added: "Over the longer term, there will be a larger, more meaningful update to the broader gameplay experience. Call it Apex 2.0, if you will. This will not be the final form of Apex Legends.
The team remains very committed. We continue to invest in our core community, which remains in the tens of millions of players. But we do think a bigger update is in order. In terms of timing, this will likely happen after Battlefield launches. The team is working hard on the specifics.
Long term, we look forward to continuing to expand the series and how we support our core community of highly competitive players, as well as new communities who want to come and experience all that Apex Legends has to offer. "