EA Cancels Mobile Apex Legends and Battlefield Games, Shutters Industrial Toys Studio

Electronic Arts announced it is canceling its Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile games. And as a result, it is shutting down its Industrial Toys game studio. From a report: Apex Legends Mobile debuted last year, bringing Respawn Entertainment's hot Apex Legends shooter game to mobile devices. It won Apple's Game of the Year for 2022 as well as the same for Google Play. Now the game will shut down in 90 days. Battlefield Mobile was in soft launch, but it will also end. In a blog post, Respawn Entertainment cited slipping quality for Apex Legends Mobile's updates as a reason for shutting down the title. EA made the announcement as it released earnings for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31.

This is hilarious

[CEC-P]

In the statement I read late last night they used a phrase like "factors out of our control." Yeah, aiming a gun in a game with your giant fat finger on a 4" screen is out of your control RIGHT NOW but when you designed the game, it was not. As in you shouldn't have designed the game. Now, massive server farms of Android VMs all aimbotting and selling the high ranking accounts, that's well within your control. It always was. In fact, look at Pokemon Go's first 2 years. They saw this coming! WHO WAS IN CHARG

Re:

[Ksevio]

It's not like they're the only ones doing it. Fortnite mobile is also pretty popular (and profitable from what I've seen). That's likely a big part of the problem, the people that prefer Apex more likely prefer it on PC while Fortnite appeals to the kids with mobile phones

Pay to Win Saturation

[Notabadguy]

In other news, the Pay to Win mobile market is heavily saturated, and not every title is going to be a Fortnite Killer / Diablo Immortal killer.

Re:

[sd4f]

It always is a race to the bottom. One title strikes gold, so then all of a sudden, everybody is trying to jump in and just saturates the market, meanwhile, the original game still ends up persisting. I can't think of a situation where a competing game has been able to dethrone the 800 lb gorilla.

And nothing of value was lost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only thing that really was of value is that (IMHO) games like Fortnite and Apex Legends seem to be good at keeping a toxic segment of the playerbase with them, which helps the entire gaming community.