Why Apex Legends is so popular? (Topic)

This game rushed to us out of nowhere. It seems that only yesterday it came out and now a month later it breaks the bar of 50 million online players. Some people immediately had a question, what is the point? Yes, the game is good, but to become so popular right off the bat? Today we'll take a look at why Apex Legends is so popular.

Trends, trends and more trends

I will say right away, and I will not torment - it's all about trends and hype, which battle pianos are raising around them today. A similar situation was once with the MOBA genre. Back in 2009, a game like Demigod was released. It was not just some no-names that had a hand in its creation, but Chris Taylor's studio, which made Dungeon Siege at one time. Most likely, you, like many other people, do not remember Demigod for the simple reason that the game was just an attempt to ride the wave of hype that Dota raised.

The game itself was maddening, critics noted that it was impossible to play it for more than an hour, the multiplayer was terrible, and battles with bots only caused apathy. Demigod did not have the very understanding of the MOBA genre, and the developers thought that if they inserted the main Dota chips into their game, then they would work. But that was not the case.

And if we look beyond one game, we will see that during the reign of the first and second parts of Dota on the market, others began to rivet simply ridiculous versions of it according to their intellectual property. At that time, we had "wonderful" MOBS in the universe of DC, The Lord of the Rings and many others. All this happened only because of the popularity of the genre and the desire to make money on it.

Let's do everything as they have

In the gaming industry, for some reason, there is still an opinion that it is enough to make this or that game in a popular genre and players will rush to play it. Dota became popular because of the lucky circumstances, and because it was fun. Others thought that the genre was the key to success and nothing should be done except copying. And it has always been that way. A cult project comes out - other publishers force their developers to do exactly the same in order to rip off a piece of a competitor's audience.

A popular game about the Second World War has appeared - all urgent matters are the game about the Second World War and as much as possible! Released StarCraft - quickly sawing as many RTS as possible. And nobody is interested in the plot elaboration, gameplay trivia and so on. No, setting and genre is enough! And there are a lot of such situations. Remember the era of Counter Strike, the era of the Heart Stone, GTA 3 or Team Fortress - all these games brought something new to the industry and were copied a bunch of times shamelessly and thoughtlessly.

It is important that no one forbids trying to make money on a new genre. Only this needs to be approached with a detailed analysis and to analyze why this or that project has become popular, how it can be improved, reworked in order to make a revolution in it and people themselves were drawn to a new project.

And so, battle royale

This whole long story was a trick for you to understand - now nothing new is happening with battle pianos, but only the same thing that happened dozens of times with other genres.

Once a group of modders made a project where the concept of the battle royale was born. After that, other guys from PUBG Corporation released the first battle royale, tightly hooking gamers into this genre like heroin. Immediately everyone began to copy it, release their own unnecessary projects, add the battle to themselves in multiplayer.

Someone, on the contrary, acted smartly and rethought the concept. This is how Fortnite appeared, which surpassed other projects, further consolidating the trend.

In order not to list a huge number of games that blindly follow the trend, I will just say that today there is a royal battle even in Tetris! Do you understand the scale?

And now, when the market is already oversaturated and there are clear favorites on it, Apex Legends appeared and captured the hearts of people.

Well-thought-out strategy

We have already written a review for this game, so we will not delve into the mechanics and gameplay details, but talk about the key to success. It all started with PR. Someone thinks that he did not exist as such. The developers just rolled out the trailer, and a couple of days later they released the game itself.

But let's be objective - Respawn Entertainment belongs to one of the most greedy companies - EA, which always calculate their moves in advance, just in order to earn money. Without a well-calculated strategy, no one would allow Respawn Entertainment to make a game on their knees, for example, from scraps of Titanfall 3.

The ingenious advertising campaign for the game was thought out as follows: the game is not promoted as such, and only a trailer is released, in parallel with this bloggers, as it were, accidentally leaked information about the new game from the creators of the titans. When the hype started, EA bought the top streamers on the day the game was released so they could only play Apex. It was a brilliant advertising campaign.

EA's PR people clearly knew how the market works now and how to attract interest in the game so as not to annoy gamers.

Second, Apex Legends is simply well done. It is one level above the standard shareware projects. Other developers have already taught gamers to understand that the game will be terrible at the exit and will have to wait for the patch of the first day, and then hundreds of other patches. And then Apex Legends comes in: optimized, lag-free and no crashing servers.

Serious people are a serious project

The next reason why Apex Legends is popular is because of its creators. In the development studio, there is now a person who was once responsible for the success of Call Of Duty and then left for EA. I want to say that Respawn Entertainment is exactly the people who know how to make shooters cool, which they showed with Titanfall.

That is why the studio not just thoughtlessly entered the battle royale genre from the category: "there are 100 people on one map and they kill each other", but with a plan of how to implement new ideas within the genre. So the game relies on teamwork, with a combination of special skills of the characters. Also in Apex there are many other features that were added to it for a reason, and most importantly, they work. And they all revolve around teamwork.

This is what I mentioned above. Nobody forbids copying, but you need to develop. And if we look at the main leaders of the battle piano market, we can see that they do not just make tracing copies.

If Pubg was with a bias towards realism and, in principle, gave birth to the genre, then Fortnite focused on madness, fun and the ability to create whatever you want in the game. In addition, it constantly hosts cool events, which are sometimes not associated with firing at each other. Last but not least, Fortnite has shown that a free game can exist without a space donation.

In the latest Call of Duty, the battle royale is made very expensive, cool, cinematic. Apex Legends, in turn, showed us teamwork.

Enter next

When asked why Apex Legends is popular, everything is simple. There is a trend and within its framework, skilled people were able to implement a project of high quality on all fronts. But at the same time, it does not differ from other similar projects. Apex is a good game, but still a product of its time. It is valuable only as long as the trend lives and will continue this way until someone does another battle royale that surpasses it, or simply creates a completely new hype trend.

The Topic of Article: Why Apex Legends is so popular?.
Author: Jake Pinkman