 So, Apex Legends, the new game from Respawn Entertainment is, unsurprisingly, a smooth, high-quality, first-person multiplayer shooter. It's also, somewhat more surprisingly, a free-to-play, battle royale game that intends to make its money through loot boxes and microtransactions. Where do you begin, man? I love Respawn's Titanfall games. I held off on playing Titanfall 1 because I'd heard it wasn't worth the money, and when I finally got to it, I found it to be the best multiplayer shooter I'd played ever. Then I found Titanfall 2 to be the best multiplayer game I had ever played, packaged with the best FPS campaign I'd played since probably Half-Life 2 Episode 2. We won't go into exhaustive detail, and all the reasons for Titanfall 2's alleged underperformance here, as I've already talked about EA's almost comical mishandling of the game before. The only thing that matters is, Respawn was bought by EA last year. This sale led to lots of speculation on how the purchase would affect the studio. Would Titanfall feature EA's signature aggressive monetization? Would EA cause the game to be rushed out and not feature complete? Would they force Respawn to make yearly releases, or direct them to create something other than the game the studio set out to make? It turns out that this sale led to exactly what everyone who was paying attention expected. EA, now in control of Respawn, had them make a cynical entry into the battle royale market. It's to Respawn's credit that Apex Legends is, in my opinion, the best battle royale game around, but it's hard to feel all that good about it. Today, let's get a pretty quick look at Apex Legends, what makes it such a good battle royale game, the amazing lesson it teaches us about AAA marketing and why ultimately, even though it has a ton of players right now, it simply won't matter in the end, as the game is unlikely to succeed to the level EA was always expected from its titles. After the logo. Okay, before we go further, I think I should give a disclaimer related to my personal tastes. I don't like battle royale modes very much. I hate the idea of random loot having any impact on a multiplayer match. I hate how slow and boring the early minutes of the match are. I hate that a significant number of games can go 15 minutes with only three gunfights and two kills. I don't like that often 90% of your time is spent not playing a first person shooter. It's a first person runner, a first person hide in a bathroomer. I do, however, understand its appeal to most people. I get that the randomness is something lots of players enjoy and I understand that the mode can create compelling moments. To me, those moments are created only because the rest of the game is kind of boring, but I get it. Still, I enjoy fast paced games. I love Titanfall because its multiplayer is ridiculously frenetic and its mobility systems make matches fast paced, intense and chaotic. I like games that provide immediate feedback and an immediate chance to learn from your mistakes. If I die in Titanfall, I wait a few seconds, respawn and I try again. If I die in Fortnite, I load back to the menu, matchmake and spend another 7 minutes running around before either getting a drop on someone or getting sniked. These games make it impossible for me to get into a groove and hit my stride. After you do well, get 3 kills and finish high or you make a mistake and start again. So this isn't for me. With all that said, I'm willing to admit that Apex Legends is an exceedingly well designed game that manages to actually iterate on the battle royale genre in enough ways to make it feel like it's not only a cynical me too entry. I mean yeah, it's a cynical stab at a game's a service for sure, but it's also a well made game. Apex Legends manages to be a unique entry not because it has anything to do with Titanfall, which it doesn't, at all. But because it's blending of hero shooter and battle royale is at least interesting and more importantly because it's respawn mechanics make the game significantly more tactical. Players can revive squadmates once, and if that person dies again, you can take their emblem and carry it to a respawn kiosk to give them yet another chance. This shouldn't be underestimated as an interesting mechanic. It addresses a good amount of what annoys me most about battle royale modes, and the game's class based combat is a somewhat unique wrinkle on this genre of game. There are several different heroes, each with their own special skill and destiny style super abilities mapped to both bumpers when playing on a controller. While the heroes add a fun little aspect to the combat, they unfortunately don't add all that much. Some of Titanfall's interesting abilities like Stim, Grapple, and Wallhack are here, but they feel less useful than they do in an actual Titanfall match because the map is so big and combat is so rare. I'm sure at high level play these abilities will be important, but for the average player they don't feel terribly useful for most of the match, and I've actually played several matches without finding any of the abilities other than healing useful at all. For the most part, matches are still about looting, positioning, and the gunplay. The actual shooting is still quite good, no surprise there, and all Titanfall's guns are here, but the limitations of the genre again mean you just don't shoot all that much. You know what, actually that's enough. The game is good. If you like battle royale games, you will like this very much. If you don't, you won't. There we go. Now let's move on to what I think are the more interesting things about this release, like the fact that while I suspect it will have a large number of players for a while, it still will not be a huge success. Dooms to Disappoint, EA it is. One of Respawn's producers gave a truly remarkable interview when this game released. When talking to Eurogamer about why there was no pre-release marketing, and in fact why the game was literally released with no advance notice at all, lead producer Drew McCoy said the following, and man, it is something. Our desire is to be completely open and transparent with our player base, and part of that expands to how we talk about problems, and we understand this game is going to have a skeptical audience. There are some people who think there are too many battle royale games, or it's a fad. The world thinks we're making Titanfall 3 and we're not. This is what we're making. To try and convince that skeptical audience for months with trailers and hands-on articles, we're just like, let the game speak for itself. It's the most powerful antidote to potential problems. We are doing a free-to-play game with essentially loot boxes after we were bought by EA, and it's not Titanfall 3. It's the perfect recipe for a marketing plan to go awry, so why have that? Let's just ship the game and let players play. So to my eyes, what that actually says is, everything people thought might have happened, EA bought us. And they asked us to use our existing Titanfall 3SS to rush out a free-to-play microtransaction laden battle royale game, and you know, they like own us now, so here's a loot box laden free-to-play battle royale game. We know you're all skeptical, but hey, we think it's actually pretty good. And it is. It is good. But unfortunately for EA, it's not going to be what they'd hoped for for a number of reasons. Apex Legends is not going to be a tremendous financial hit for EA. Despite how good the game is, despite the inherent goodwill that Respawn has built up amongst the core gamers, despite the game being streamer-friendly and free-to-play. To explain that, I think we need to briefly touch on what is not in this game and why. Obviously, Titans aren't here, which is totally understandable for the mode. What's also not here is Titanfall's fantastic and carefully crafted maps and its most important system that synergizes with those maps. This has no double jump, it has no wall running, it has no par core system, and player speed is reduced quite a bit. You still have the slide, but without the double jump, the slide is actually kind of nerfed. And there's a good reason for that. Titanfall's mobility system is what gave the game such a ludicrous skill ceiling. In Titanfall, you can shoot while running on a wall. You can chain a double jump into a slide, into a higher and faster jump, into a wall run, into a jump, into a slide, all while shooting. It's a game that demands mastery from players. When I moved on from Titanfall 2, I was routinely finishing atop the leaderboards. When I went back for footage a year and a half later, I actually could not get a kill. It's a difficult game because there's an awful lot to learn. Apex, in order to be successful, must appeal to a more casual audience. The game must be screw-able and immediately accessible to that larger audience. EA didn't make a free-to-play battle royale game for the small, hardcore shooter market. So let's talk about the most important thing. Can this thing make a whole bunch of money? If we look at the development schedule for Titanfall games, it makes it clear that Respawn A knows how to make a fucking shooter and B is extremely efficient. Both games were developed quickly, within two years, and with a studio that's small by AAA standards. When we assume that Respawn used the same modified Source Engine and many of Titanfall's assets for this, I think it's safe to say the development costs were relatively modest, far smaller than they were for Titanfall 2. But the game also is free, there will be no sales, so the game's financial success hinges on its loot box and skins. Fortnite and Overwatch make an impossible amount of money selling skins, and it's reasonable for EA to look at the talented Respawn and the obvious quality of their work and assume they can get in on that action. But I simply don't think that's the case. It's important to remember that Fortnite's skins are more than just skins. They are, for all intents and purposes, entirely new character models. And many of them are visually striking. And of course, Fortnite is played almost entirely in third person. Overwatch is an FPS hero shooter with great character skins, but there's a big difference there too. Blizzard has many skills and one of them is its amazing ability to pack actual character into its titles. Through flawless animations, absolutely amazing artists, and superb world building, Blizzard made the characters in Overwatch more than just a collection of their combat skills. I mean, this is also probably a result of the nearly 10 years they worked on the property, first as the now defunct Titan project, and then through cartoons and comics and Overwatch development itself. The world of Overwatch is fleshed out and compelling. Titanfall has the potential to do that and its universe is interesting, but it's simply not on the same level, not even close. Titanfall is loved because its gameplay was so exciting and fresh. Its world building and story were adequate, but not enrapturing. The characters in Apex Legends have cool designs and animations and artwork. They all feel unique, but they simply don't have the same kind of carefully built backstories. They've spent a mountain of money making movies and comics to make us care about our Overwatch mains as actual characters. Respawn hasn't done that. Are the skins cool? Yeah, they actually are. Respawn also has good artists, but Apex Legends character selection is a collection of combat skills, not an actual character. I love Titanfall too as much as any shooter I've played, and probably as much as any game I've played in the current generation, but I think it's fair to say that Overwatch feels like it has more story and character packed into a few maps and a couple dozen heroes in a multiplayer deathmatch game than Titanfall 2 was able to get in an entire single-player campaign. I want to quote that Eurogamer interview with McCoy again for what I consider a fairly absurd assertion. McCoy said the following, quote, we were actually looking to find ways to tell more stories within Titanfall. The fight between the IMC and Malicious is pretty binary, pretty black and white, and what's really exciting is to think of it in a more gray area. What does the Wild West of the Titanfall universe look like? With these sometimes nasty characters, what are they like? Caustic is a great example because he's like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He's not a real, real bad guy, but he's deliciously evil, and getting more of those types of characters that span the range, so for us, it's really about the way to add more depth to this world. Forgive me, but what a ridiculous crock of shit that is. Apex Legends features a 15-second cutscene of Blisk when you first start the game and a few generic character lines. If Respawn was actually interested in exploring the gray area and moral ambiguity of the universe, one would assume the proper place to do that is a campaign, not a battle royale mode. Respawn has many commendable talents. Character and moral ambiguity and story are not really amongst them. Blizzard can accomplish this in Overwatch because they are uncommonly good at character creation, even if they're not that good at plot. Respawn had trouble doing this in a single player campaign. I find it hard to believe the thing that's most exciting about their free-to-play battle royale mode is the chance to expand the universe. Come on man, that's silly. Character skins in Overwatch matter because people care about the characters. It matters in Fortnite because the skins ARE the characters. Apex Legends has neither of these things going for it. As good as the gameplay on offer is, the simple fact remains that it's immediately and obviously apparent that players will never be as attached to Lifeline as they are to Mercy. Then there are other weapon skins. Everyone loves FPS weapon skins and the character customization and skin unlocks in Titanfall 2 are all cool. And the weapon skins here in Apex Legends are really fucking cool actually. But this is a battle royale game. You don't choose your loadout, you can't control what weapons you will have, buying a weapon skin so that every 3 matches when you pick up a hemlock it has flames on it isn't quite as interesting as unlocking a skin in Titanfall that you will be using every moment of every match. I just don't see it working. I've been wrong before but I don't know man, I don't see it. Prove that marketing costs too much. If there's one tremendous positive lesson that Apex Legends teaches but which will be completely and utterly ignored is that the marketing budgets for triple A games are outrageous and unnecessary. We've learned over time that game budgets are actually very similar to big budget movies and that extends out to the percentage of budget earmarked for marketing. The rule of thumb in both movie and video game marketing is an astonishing half of the budget goes to marketing. This can make it a little tricky when you hear about video game budgets. In general, when we try to suss out how much a movie is made at the box office, it's easier because published movie budgets don't include marketing. So for instance, let's look at 2018's biggest film Black Panther. Black Panther had a published budget of $200 million. That means the marketing was $100 million giving us a total production cost of $300 million. We subtract that from the 1.34 billion worldwide box office take and find the movie made a profit of $734 million. Damn. We very rarely get video game budgets like we do movies. Occasionally we'll get numbers and various news stories have made it clear that big budget triple A games can cost as much as a movie with $150 million budget not being deemed outrageous. If we take that $150 million budget as total budget, we would see the publishers are spending $75 million to $150 million to market their games. This is an unbelievable amount of money. It's so much money that it makes it impossible for even a successful midsize company to self-publish. Bungie is going to self-publish now, but Bungie is huge, wealthy, credit worthy, and a company of nearly a thousand people. Respawn Entertainment simply isn't a big enough company to ever dream of dropping $150 million in marketing. But then Apex Legends dropped, literally with absolutely zero, zero marketing. No months-long EA Game Changers campaign, no paid-for magazine articles, no tremendous millions of dollars spent on a television live-action trailer campaign. The game just dropped. They did a magazine interview, people streamed it, and 2 million downloaded it, and 1 million were online concurrently with zero marketing campaign. This in my opinion shows that publishers are less needed than ever before because marketing is less important than ever before for everything other than the biggest games whose success depend upon selling every last possible copy. Marketing can obviously help a game sell, and it can help sell a bad game, but great games will be played with even modest marketing campaigns. A good example, The Binding of Isaac, which is not a terribly mainstream game, sold over 2 million copies in its first 18 months of release with barely any marketing campaign at all. Even games fail, rarely has to do with not enough having been spent on marketing. Apex Legends got no, again literally zero marketing, and 2 million people downloaded it in 48 hours. Now back to why I don't think the game will actually be a Fortnite-like economic success. I don't think Apex will be an economic failure because its production cost is almost certainly very low, and again, it's spent nothing on marketing. But I'm also convinced the game will not be a cash cow. When EA has made it abundantly clear, they don't want profitable games in their roster. They want cash cows. Respawn first made Titanfall, which was a fantastic game that released at a time when people thought a multiplayer-only game was bullshit and a bad value. It was a console exclusive on a weak-selling console. EA was unhappy with the results, even though the game was profitable. Then they made Titanfall 2, which was an amazing game that some people actually thought was still an Xbox exclusive, a rare case where better marketing actually would have been important, and EA allowed the game to release between the most anticipated battlefield in years and Call of Duty, like in the week between those two releases. The game was apparently still profitable, but EA again was disappointed, showing that their internal valuations are fundamentally flawed within their finance departments. Then Respawn was bought for $400 million by EA, and their first release is a free-to-play, battle royale game with loot boxes and $20 skins. EA says that Respawn is also working on a quote, premium Titanfall game, unquote, but that is a meaningless statement for me. What does that mean? And it's important to remember that EA would have no compunction with turning Respawn into a battlefield support studio. They did that to visceral. Will they make Respawn use the frost fight engine in this premium game? Will they allow them to make the game they want? Will they insist on accessibility and gameplay and microtransactions? When I had heard that Respawn sold to EA, I was nervous about the future of the studio. This release makes me more nervous, not less. If Apex Legends is a monetization monster, that's a bad thing for the likelihood that Respawn keeps making the games that made them beloved. If it's a microtransaction failure, that's a bad thing for the likelihood that Respawn keeps making the games that made them beloved. And the fact that I think it's the best battle royale game ever released doesn't make me less nervous. This game isn't as accessible as Fortnite. It does not have the name recognition of Call of Duty or Battlefield. It doesn't have the charm and character of Overwatch. I think it's highly likely the game keeps a ton of players for a little while before slowly dwindling, and ultimately it will do just fine, but not so well that it's a major factor in EA's bottom line for any prolonged period. The game is good, but it's immediately clear that the special circumstances that allow Fortnite and Overwatch to be microtransaction behemoths just isn't here. And ultimately, you know what disappoints me most about this game? The fact that if this was a mode contained within the third Titanfall game, it would almost certainly have been incredibly well received. And a real selling point that would drive massive sales in what is already one of the game's best shooters. But instead of letting Respawn simply make the next Titanfall a feature complete quality product I am begging to spend $60 on, EA has decided they had to have a Games of Service Destiny competitor from Bioware. And the Games of Service Fortnite and Overwatch competitor rolled into one from Respawn, but hits are not made by committee. You can't take two popular games that exploded with Zonra, combine them, stuff them full of loot boxes and microtransactions and three separate confusing currencies and create a huge hit. I might very well be wrong and Apex Legends might sell a billion in weaponskins this year. But what if I'm right? What if the game retains a shitload of players like me who simply don't engage in a very confusing and really outrageously priced microtransaction store? If that's the case, it might be time for EA to stop comically chasing fads that have already peaked and allow the studios they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on to make the games that caused EA to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them. EA presumably bought Respawn because Titanfall 2 was universally praised as a spectacular game. They made that game with little to no creative input from EA. Battlefield and Battlefront are badly struggling as a result of too tight a development schedule that's caused them to release games that aren't complete and clearly don't have the loving craft of DICE's earlier entries. This release isn't surprising in the least and it's lucky for EA that Respawn could make a competent shooter in its sleep. But if EA wants another big hit, they'd be wise to extricate themselves from game development decisions and especially from genre and mode decisions. EA would be best served tempering investor expectations and redirecting its focus to the things it's almost certainly most competent at, financing, corporate structuring, supply chain and retail management, data management, you know, business shit. If they don't, Respawn will eventually end up going the way of Visceral. If this game had released as a mode in Titanfall 3, man, it would have gone a long way to giving EA the massive hit they and their investors have been chasing so hard. Instead, it's almost guaranteed to quote, fail to meet expectations and once again, EA will have nobody to blame but themselves. Alright, I'll see you in a couple of days again. Thanks for coming. Bye. And if you think I'm wrong, amen, put it in the comments. See ya.