Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment announced the game’s mobile version will shut down in all regions on May 1st, just a few weeks shy of its one-year anniversary. As if that wasn’t enough bad news for players, it also said that once the game is gone, so are any items or extras they purchased in Apex Legends Mobile.
A news post from EA described the shutdown as a “mutual decision” reached with its “development partner”; Apex Legends Mobile was developed by Respawn and Tencent’s Lightspeed & Quantum Studios, which also handles the mobile port of PUBG. Respawn’s post reiterates that note but starts by claiming, “Following a strong start, the content pipeline for Apex Legends Mobile has begun to fall short of that bar for quality, quantity, and cadence.”
Since it launched, Apex Legends Mobile has had a reputation for adding tweaks players would’ve liked to see in the full game, with extra abilities for existing legends, new game modes, and a pair of mobile-exclusive legends, Fade and Rhapsody.
As of 4PM ET Tuesday, you can no longer buy things with real money in the game, and the game will also be pulled from app stores. It will officially shut down at 7PM ET on May 1st.
However, EA isn’t providing any refunds for real money purchases, “per the terms of the EA User Agreement,” the company wrote in an FAQ. That might feel like a slap in the face to people who had invested their cash into the game, and it looks especially tight-fisted from EA when developer Iron Galaxy is offering to refund players for their purchases in Rumbleverse ahead of the just-announced shutdown of that game.
EA is also halting development on its plans Battlefield mobile game, which it announced in April 2021. “As the industry has evolved and our strategy to create a deeply connected Battlefield ecosystem has taken shape, we decided to pivot from the current direction to best deliver on our vision for the franchise and to meet the expectations of our players,” EA wrote in a news post on its website.
The company has made a number of changes to the Battlefield franchise following the poor debut of Battlefield 2042, including putting Respawn head Vince Zampella in charge of the franchise and announcing a new narrative campaign in the works from a new studio, Ridgeline Games. “We’re working hard at evolving Battlefield 2042and are in pre-production on our future Battlefield experiences at our studios across the globe,” EA said in its post.