Yesterday EA and Respawn Entertainment “surprise" released Apex Legends, a new battle royale game that takes place inside the same universe as Respawn’s awesome Titanfall series. I say “surprise" because in actuality several influencers were given the game ahead of time and almost everything about the game leaked ahead of its official reveal, but that hasn’t seemed to diminish the excitement over Apex Legends. During EA’s third quarter fiscal 2019 earnings call today, as relayed by the absolutely fantastic Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners, they announced that Apex Legends already has 2.5 million players and peaked with 600,000 concurrent players. So yeah, it’s pretty hot right now. Also announced on the call was the surprising-but-actually-not-surprising-at-all news that EA is considering a mobile version of Apex Legends that would feature crossplay.
I say that announcement is surprising because Apex Legends is so fresh a mobile version hadn’t even occurred to me yet, but it’s also not surprising at all given the astronomical success that Fortnite (Free) has seen with its mobile version over the past year. As we have seen with not just Fortnite but several titles before, if developers can give basically the same experience on any platform and have progress sync in the cloud, then gamers will play a game on anything. Games like Fortnite are almost more about friends getting together and hanging out in-game than p...