EA cancels two mobile games

EA is shutting down one mobile game and has cancelled another, citing increasingly poor quality in Apex Legends Mobile’s updates.

EA has announced that it’s shutting down one mobile game and cancelling another that was in development, citing poor quality in one game as the reason for the shuttering.

In a blog post on EA’s website, Respawn Entertainment, the developer behind Apex Legends, said that the mobile version of the game will be shutting down on May 1. As of today, players will no longer be able to buy currency in the game, and after the shutdown, the game will go offline forever.

Respawn says that the reason for the shutdown is because the mobile game was struggling to meet the high bar of quality it expects from its games, despite having worked with its development partner, Tencent’s Lightspeed Studios, for months to improve the game.

“At Respawn, we aim to provide players with games that are consistently outstanding,” the blog post says, “Following a strong start, the content pipeline for Apex Legends Mobile has begun to fall short of that bar for quality, quantity, and cadence. It is for this reason, after months of working with our development partner, that we have made the mutual decision to sunset our mobile game”.

Apex Legends Mobile was supposed to have features similar to the main game, but routinely fell behind in updates. Picture: EA

Respawn and EA say that they won’t be offering refunds for any real money purchases made in the game, but that players will be able to continue using the items and currency they already have up until the shutdown date.

EA also announced that it would be cancelling the Battlefield mobile game that was in development at its Industrial Toys studio, as well as closing the studio itself. Another blog post announcing the cancellation said that the company decided to “pivot from the current direction” of the franchise, and instead devote resources to improving the embattled Battlefield 2042.

As reported by VentureBeat, EA acquired Industrial Toys in 2018, growing the studio from just 14 employees up to 60 in the five years since the acquisition. The studio was founded by Alex Seropian, one of the co-creators of the popular Halo series, to create mobile games for “core gamers”. It’s not known if employees at the studio will transition to other studios within EA, or if they’ll be let go.

Apex Legends Mobile has been popular in Japan and India, but saw little playership in the West. Picture: EA

EA isn’t the only company cancelling its game projects of late. Wizards of the Coast, best known for Dungeons & Dragons, recently announced it was scrapping its game projects, with “at least” five video game projects cancelled.

Ubisoft recently announced that it had cancelled three unannounced games too, alongside the sixth delay of one of its big games, Skull and Bones. The company did not reveal which games had been cancelled.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.