Apple’s 2022 iPhone Game of the Year ‘Apex Legends Mobile’ Shutting Down in May

Well here is some news that I was not exactly prepared for. Respawn Entertainment has announced that they’ll be sunsetting Apex Legends Mobile on May 1st, just shy of a year from its official global launch. They cite the quality bar for content, as well as frequency of new content, being below what they consider acceptable. And so in mutual agreement with their development partner, presumably Tencent and their subsidiary studios, they have decided to wind the game down over the next 90 days with the game becoming fully unplayable at 4pm PDT on May 1st, 2023. As for what players can expect until then, as of right now the game is no longer available on the iOS or Android app stores and all in-app purchases have been disabled. Any virtual currency players already have can be spent up until the point of servers going offline on May 1st, however there will be no refunds offered.

This is a pretty surprising development. Just two months ago Apple chose Apex Legends Mobile as their iPhone Game of the Year for 2022, and all signs pointed to it being a fairly successful game. And while it only just launched globally on May of last year, it had been in development for at least a couple of years prior to that, going through all manner of different beta tests and soft launches. I can’t even imagine the amount of money and resources that were poured into Apex Legends Mobile’s development, so to see it go down less than a year after global launch is pretty shocking. On the other hand, these live service games are extremely expensive to host and maintain, and even if it was a popular game, it’s certainly possible it just plain wasn’t popular enough or being monetized well enough to continue on with. It’s a real shame, and for anyone who is an active Apex Legends Mobile player my heart goes out to you and hopefully you can have some fun for the next few months before the game’s lights go out in May.