Respawn Entertainment officially announced that it has opened a new studio in Wisconsin, USA, to assist with the further development of Apex Legends, as the studio heads believe the franchise will be around for at least the next 10 to 15 years.
"We believe in Apex as a franchise that's going to be around for 10,15 years or more and we're excited to make that happen," said Steven Ferreira in an interview with Game Industry about the opening of the new studio. Respawn has enlisted industry veteran Ryan Burnett to lead the new studio. Burnet. Burnett was also a director of engine production at Epic Games.
"Building the live service of Apex is a constant cycle of trying new things and experimenting," said Ferreira when explaining what we should expect from the new studio. "And that's what Wisconsin is going to give us – that capacity to do more of that, pushing into new areas like Legend classes and trying to do things we haven't done before. There's two kinds of key pieces there: one is obviously the capacity part of it and helping us to build up our team structure to do that, but the other is new perspectives and ideas. Folks with different experiences and different backgrounds are something we're always looking at."
Apex Legends was originally launched back in 2019. The game rose to significant fame soon after its launch, breaking the record of becoming the fastest-growing live-service game at the time by reaching over 50 million players in a month.
Despite such a huge success, Apex Legends' mobile version was recently shut down by Electronic Arts. While Apex Legends Mobile had a lot of players who were excited about the game's growth, Respawn Entertainment revealed that it wasn't capable of delivering long-term content for the game of the same quality as the main game, which was the reason why the studio decided to end development of the mobile version.
Apex Legends has received 16 seasons of content so far. The game's current season "Revelry" was the first ever season to launch without a new Legend. Instead, Respawn brought a number of gameplay changes such as dividing the current Legends into different classes.