The shooter Apex Legends (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android, iOS) has been a success story for Electronic Arts in recent years. Financial reports have highlighted how well the shooter is performing. Now EA is turning the price screw and wants to extract more money from players with the Battle Pass starting from Season 22. Players are responding with over 74,000 negative reviews on Steam.
This is the change in Apex Legends:
- For years, it was possible to get the Battle Pass with its cosmetic rewards almost for free in Apex Legends. Because if you played through a Battle Pass, you received enough in-game currency, Apex Coins, to buy the next one.
- However, EA announced a change for the Season Pass a few weeks ago: Starting from the launch of Season 22 on August 6, there will be 2 Battle Passes per season, both of which can only be purchased with real money, but they will offer better rewards and require less time.
- In practice, this means that players will have to spend €20 per season starting August 6 to access 2 Battle Passes, whereas at least avid players in the past didn’t have to spend any money for that.
Apex Legends receives over 71,400 negative reviews on Steam
This is the reaction now: The players of Apex Legends are furious about the change and express their anger to an extreme extent through Steam reviews:
- We reported on July 11 that first negative reviews started pouring in.
- By now, it has turned into an avalanche of bad reviews: Apex Legends now has “Extremely Negative” among recent reviews – only 7% of 80,037 reviews are positive.
Players complain, but most continue to play
What’s the catch with the protest? Although the Steam reviews have plummeted, the player numbers remain largely stable.
As can be seen from the Steam charts, player numbers still reach around 215,000 players at the peak of a day. This is slightly lower than before the announcement, but within the normal fluctuations of Apex Legends: The longer a season lasts, the lower the player numbers become.
The negative Steam reviews and the announcement to show EA and stop playing Apex Legends are not yet reflected in the player numbers.
Is the protest having any effect? According to rumors, EA is planning to reverse the changes before they go live. However, these are currently just rumors circulating on Twitter.
Battle Passes have always been criticized by parts of the community in live service games. Because what seems so nice and player-friendly at first glance comes with certain obligations and actually has little to do with gameplay: Some microtransactions in new MMOs border on self-enslavement.
