REACTION - Apex’s egregious new Battle Pass is transparent and greedy

Silly manoeuvrers.

By Jonathan Garrett
11/07/24

We’ve seen some wonky decision making in our time, particularly from corporate overlords who are painfully out of touch with wider sentiment and common sense business practice. But Respawn’s new two part seasonal Battle Pass, where they essentially split the content into two halves and charge almost full price for each one, is a nonsense move that reeks of the EA of old.

They’ve been on such a hot streak lately; Apex going from strength to strength, Dragon Age: Veilguard shaping up nicely, and the Dead Space remake all demonstrate a publisher putting quality first. But here we are, in Apex’s 22nd season, and they believe that now is the time to reinvent their monetisation model in the name of trimming out guff and making things accessible?

The community response has been almost uniformly negative. It feels like a mandated move, and something that Respawn would hopefully have voiced concerns about internally when the call came down. At least, we hope that’s the case, otherwise Respawn have gone off the rails with this one. With enough pushback, we may see a retraction, but as of right now, this is tone deaf change that has landed very poorly indeed.

Source: Eurogamer.


TARPS?

At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.

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