Apex Legends coming to mobiles – and EA has another shooter planned too
APEX LEGENDS will be coming to mobile phones.
EA, the game's publisher, said it was in "advanced negotiations" to bring the battle royale game to mobiles when it revealed its latest financial results.
It also revealed it has another new first-person shooter game planned for release this year, but did not reveal what it was.
Apex Legends hit 50 million players in four weeks after launch, but hasn't hit a significant milestone in the two months since - but has hit headline for less savoury reasons.
The game does now have a Fornite-like Battle Pass that gives players access to new rewards and challenges.
It also has had one new character added since launch, though fans have been disappointed by the lack of other new content.
All EA said on a conference call with investors was that it now had "over 50 million players" according to
That still makes the game a massive success for EA, which expects gamers to shell out between £230 million and £300 million in-game in the next year.
Fortnite's monthly revenue peaked last year at over £240 million, though it's not raking in quite that much at the moment.
To try and keep up the momentum, EA has revealed it is trying to bring Apex Legends to mobile phones, and is attempting to get it approved for release in China.
It is possible the mobile version may never see the light of day in Europe or the US -- EA's free-to-play FIFA Online series is huge across Asia, including China, but isn't officially available anywhere else.
The success of Apex Legends means you can expect more free-to-play games from EA.
Players will get "more choice in premium, subscription, and free-to-play models," the firm said, promising that they would still release full-price retail games even as they expanded the range of games with no cost of entry that are funded by constant player spending.
Those will include "sports games, a racing game, an action title and a first-person shooter," according to EA.
The main sports games we know about are FIFA 20, Madden NFL 20, NBA Live 20, NHL 20, with the firm's final UFC game, UFC 4 likely as well.
The racing game is a new title in the Need For Speed franchise, and the action title is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
We don't know, however, what the upcoming first-person shooter is -- a new Battlefield game is not expected this year, and another Star Wars Battlefront game seems unlikely given the arrival of Fallen Order.
EA did promise "related Titanfall experiences" alongside Apex Legends, and is developing a new Plants vs. Zombies game -- and if the latter is Garden Warfare 3, that would fill the FPS brief.
On the call EA also revealed it is bringing EA Access to PlayStation this July.
The £3.99-a-month, £19.99-a-year service gives gamers early access to upcoming EA games, discounts on EA games they buy digitally, and access to a library of older EA-published games to play for free.
It has been on Xbox and PC for years, but Sony initially blocked in on PS4 claiming it did not offer good value for gamers.
Anthem's disastrous launch "did not meet expectations", according to EA, and mass layoffs across the company were dismissed in the call as "things that did not go as planned," and offered more conservative estimates for this year's launches.
Despite those forecasts, next year EA hopes to trouser £4.12 billion, which would be 9 per cent more cash than it made this year -- and more cash than they firm has ever made in a year before.
2019 and 2020 look to be an interesting year for games with news expected about the PlayStation 5, a possible Xbox 2 reveal at E3 this summer and Google Stadia lurking in the background promising to trample the traditional gaming market whenever Google deigns to release more information about it.
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