EA CEO pushes back against the idea of an Apex 2.0 to solve its issues after the title's disappointing quarter
As Apex Legends "fell short of expectations" during Electronic Arts' otherwise record Q2 FY25, CEO Andrew Wilson pushed back against the idea of an 'Apex 2.0' to fix its issues during the earnings call's Q&A.
As part of the company's financial presentation, CFO Stuart Canfield highlighted that Apex Legends had seen "lower player engagement" for the quarter ended September 30, 2024, but that EA is continuing to invest in "meaningful change" for the title.
In the Q&A portion of the call, an analyst asked how much of the "systematic rethink" of Apex "can be done fixing a part while the car is in motion," wondering whether it required "a whole studs up rebuild and something like an Apex 2.0 might be the way to go about it rather than incremental change."
"It's a really good question and probably beyond the scope of this conversation," Wilson answered. "But what I would say is that typically, what we have seen – in the context of live-service driven games at scale – is the version two thing has almost never been as successful as the version one thing.
And so actually, the objective right now is to ensure that we are continuing to support the global player base that we have and deliver the new innovative creative content on a season-by-season basis, as well as build these other things, but build them in a way that players do not have to give up the progress that they've made or the investment that they have put into the existing ecosystem."
He continued: "Anytime we call a global player community to have to choose between the investments they've made to-date and future innovation creativity, that's never a good place to put our community in.
"And so our objective will be to continue to innovate in the core experience, and you are seeing that from season-to-season now as our seasons get progressively bigger, and we're changing kind of key modalities at play within those seasons and then build additional opportunities for engagement in different modalities of play beyond what the
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