Respawn discards weekly Apex Legends updates in order to not overwork the team

The Epic Games continuous crunch culture controversy led to a timely statement from Apex Legends' developer Respawn Entertainment. When faced with the possibility – and numbers – that Apex Legends was “overvalued” and in a downward spiral, partly due to the lack of frequent updates, Executive Producer Drew McCoy openly spoke about it.

McCoy says that the Apex Legends launch exceeded their expectations, with 50 million players in the first month. However, he admits that the team wasn't transparent enough about future content and the way that they intend to support the game. Naturally, this involves a lot of fixes and patches in the background.

Respawn is currently prioritizing things such as cheaters, hit registration issues, slow server performance at the start of each match, improved communication with the community and season launches. June should bring some info about Apex Legends' Season 2, but you can expect a new Legend, a new weapon, an overhaul of Kings Canyon and more content than what Season 1 offered.

Finally, a note about the Respawn teams. Apex Legends has its own development team, while other team is working on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. It's worth mentioning that Respawn had to put future Titanfall games on hold in order to support Apex Legends.

Gamasutra also had an interesting chat with Respawn CEO Vince Zampella regarding the Apex Legends update process. Zampella says that Respawn always planned on having season releases in order to maintain a strong quality-of-life for the developers working on Apex Legends.

“Our intention was to always be seasonal, so we’re kind of staying with that,” says Zampella. “The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that.”

That is just great of him and hopefully not just some hollow marketing banter. The industry needs more righteous people to fight for safer, non-toxic environments.