Apex, Weekly Content and why you Should be Glad they don’t do it

The past month has been a violent pile of, quite honestly, ridiculous claims. “Apex is dying!” “People have moved on!” “They didn’t put content out fast enough.” Just in case you aren’t picking up on the tone here, none of it is true.

Respawn Entertainment, the minds behind the battle royale that took the gaming community by storm that brought in 25 million unique players in just under 2 weeks. Now that’s impressive. But as the weeks turned into a month and new content was demanded by the community, many turned their backs on the game. They had gotten used to the weekly content released by games like Fortnite and refused to accept anything less. The only problem with weekly content is it’s toll on employees.

In order for Epic to push weekly content in Fortnite, their employees have to work ridiculous hours every week, close to or over 100. That’s the kind of hours designers work during a release crunch, except every time you finish the crunch a new one starts the next day. It causes high turnover in a company and is downright unethical, and Epic should be ashamed of themselves in every regard. On the flip side Respawn has been very open and honest with the community, often responding to the official subreddit for the game and saying why they can’t and won’t push content out at that rate, and I applaud their decision. Just because people want something doesn’t mean you can work your employees to death.

So yes, people claim the game is dying because it can’t keep up with its competition. But its player base is still huge, and I believe that it’s uniqueness and the fact that Respawn actually treats it’s employees well will keep it strong in the long run.