Respawn Entertainment is giving away Apex Legends packs to its players.
They shared this message on their official Twitter account today:
“Thank you legends for your patience as we work through the data outage and the data recovery process. As a thank you for your understanding, we’re giving everyone 8 Apex Packs! Simply log in before April 24 at 10 am PT to see them in your account.”
As we had reported just last week, Respawn made a mistake while fixing a different issue, forcing them to take Apex Legends temporarily offline. The bug created issues with players getting their progress back, and it took them this long to address the issue.
Some fans may not be satisfied with this make-good, particularly if Respawn wasn’t able to restore some of their progress, but this is par for the course for the live service industry. If some players will still be mad after this, they could choose to stop playing. But there will likely be more people who will eventually come back, partly because they really like playing it, or because they want to play with their friends.
Electronic Arts has a bigger plan for Apex Legends, as CEO Andrew Wilson spoke in their last financial call about expanding the game “beyond the traditional battle royale universe.” Wilson’s statements seem to hint at more modes or perhaps spinoffs for Apex Legends, but nothing to that effect has been announced.
To be clear, the reason these look like possibilities is because Fortnite very recently announced a host of new spinoff games, which Fortnite players can get into with their existing accounts. Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, and Lego Fortnite all offer completely different experiences, with the intent to keep players engaged.
Of course, there’s a big difference between Fortnite and Apex Legends. As Respawn has made clear, Apex Legends is part of the Titanfall universe, a franchise that isn’t as financially successful, but beloved by the fans it does have. If there’s any spinoff that EA should greenlight, the fans will obviously be calling for a Titanfall 3.
It’s definitely going to be interesting if Respawn got the greenlight to formally connect the Apex Legends and Titanfall universes. There seems to be a huge opportunity to make Titanfall the big franchise it deserves to be, if Respawn finds a way to make it appealing to their Apex Legends audience.
Does that mean Titanfall 3 becomes a free-to-play live service game too? There may be merits to at least making a spinoff title with Respawn making use of what they already learned with that monetization model. In any case, that would be something to get gamers excited, if EA actually greenlit it.
