Come along, because this is one of those archive news items that show how a game can become a phenomenon overnight. In March 2019, the monthly report from SuperData, a company that tracked the industry’s digital revenue, brought the February numbers, and the big highlight was Apex Legends: Respawn Entertainment’s free battle royale generated about US$ 92 million across all platforms, with most of it coming from consoles.
That figure made Apex Legends the highest-grossing free-to-play game in its launch month so far. And check out this detail: the game had been released as a surprise, on February 4, 2019, by Electronic Arts, without a months-long campaign beforehand. In the first week it already passed 25 million players and, in the first month, reached 50 million. My little gamer heart even speeds up at that pace!
The same report looked at other games from the period. Anthem, from BioWare, also from EA, totaled about US$ 100 million in digital revenue, almost all of it from sales of the game itself; cosmetic item microtransactions accounted for only US$ 3.5 million of that total. Hearthstone, Blizzard’s card game, saw a 52% drop year over year, a reflection of greater competition in the genre and the natural wear of a game that had already been out for years.
What came next
Apex Legends kept growing. In April 2021, the player base passed 100 million, and cumulative revenue surpassed US$ 1 billion in February 2021 and US$ 2 billion in May 2022. The game came to Steam on November 4, 2020, to Nintendo Switch on March 9, 2021 and got native PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions on March 29, 2022. The mobile version debuted in May 2022 but was shut down a year later. Among its awards, Apex took the Golden Joystick for best multiplayer in 2019 and the D.I.C.E. award for online game of the year in 2020. A lovely trajectory for something that started with no warning at all.
Source: SuperData, via Eurogamer.
Lady Combo
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