"If people are saying 'dead game,' that means our game is alive:" how Apex Legends is winning back players

Poke around in any live-service game’s forums or communities for any length of time and you’ll find the phrase ‘dead game’ written in a few threads. Social media is rife with the accusation. But the Apex Legends developers at Respawn have brought their battle royale game back to life, with it reaching its highest player count in 18 months. PCGamesN sat down with design director Evan Nikolich and director of player investment Chris Cleroux to discuss how they’ve pulled off this miraculous recovery and why the ‘dead game’ label isn’t the death knell you might think.

“If people are saying, ‘dead game’, that means our game is alive,” says Nikolich. “Our game is dead when no one says anything at all.” Apex Legends is anything but. Respawn has recently reversed a downward trajectory when it comes to player counts. After a year of relative stability, Season 28 saw player counts rise by 50% on Steam, reaching its highest peak since August 2024.

This data comes from SteamDB, so doesn’t take into account console players. However, Nikolich echoes the sentiment and is happy with the progress made. The uptick in players is the result of years of working with the community, he explains.

“What you’re seeing is the work that started back at the end of 2024,” he says. “We’ve started getting more responsive, moving faster, we’ve changed the way we worked internally, and I think that reflects what you’re seeing in the game. The success that we’ve been seeing this season is all these additive changes compounding over time.

“We’re going to keep working that way. We’re gonna stay really close to the players. This is what I love about working in live games: listening to the players, building the best experience for our current player base.”

Apex Legends Season 29 could not come at a better time for Respawn. Axle is the first new Legend in over a year, and her exciting high-speed kit will surely pull more players in. However, Nikolich is working hard to bring new players to the game in order to match the game’s peak player count that it reached back in 2023.

“The other big thing we’re looking to is, how do we make our game more approachable and have more appeal? We’re still in a competitive market, we’re still not where our highs were. I want to get us back to where we were. We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us but I believe in this team and I believe in our ability to do that. The momentum is in our favour right now, we’ve just got to stay focused and keep going.”

As a part of this commitment to bringing new players into the fold, Chris Cleroux is heading up some major changes to solo players in ranked mode, which will arrive later in Season 29.

“There is an advantage that we see via the winrates between premade squads and solo queue players,” Cleroux explains. Therefore, solo queue players are going to go into a “slightly easier lobby” based on their skill level. Cleroux reiterates that this is a test that the team will monitor closely, but it could help to reduce the disparity between playing solo and with two friends.

Cleroux also teases that there are “experiments that are coming up” to do with matchmaking in ranked and “even bigger stuff that I can’t talk about yet.” Despite Respawn’s newfound commitment to transparency, it seems some changes will remain cryptic for the time being. “It’s going to be an exciting year,” he teases.

Apex Legends has turned a corner by listening to players and opening up avenues for communications. Its well-known ‘big swings’ at meta changes and patches are better received when you can discuss them with a dev in an AMA, and it feels good when your feedback is implemented quickly to the live game. But there’s still a long way to go.

Apex Legends is going to need to do something special if it wants to match its peak player counts of over 620,000 from 2023 – over double its recent peak. But if we’re only just now seeing the fruits of Respawn’s labor after 18 months of effort, anything seems possible.