Apex Legends / Anthem — two business strategies to learn from

“Games as a service” — it’s not a new term in the video game industry. Developers create huge virtual universes and regularly add various features to them. There are lots of such titles on the market, and two quite big games have been added to this list recently: Apex Legends and Anthem.

They attract my attention by their different attitudes to the game business strategies. I see in them valuable lessons for all the other game developers and publishers.

Apex Perfection

There are two things to notice about this game — it appeared suddenly, without any teasers and pre-release trailers, and also it appeared in its almost perfect state, giving players the best emotions possible.

How much money do we invest in the introductory campaigns for our upcoming games? Do these expenses give the same level of effectiveness like that sudden and unexpected release of Apex Legends?

Making promises for the community to deliver a game with certain features on a particular date creates significant pressure on the development team. Some companies make decisions to cut parts of the promised content and upset gamers with delays. Respawn Entertainment, developers of Apex Legends decided to act differently and to not announce the game at all. I’m sure, there were internal deadlines, but that was obviously easier to adjust them.

After a few weeks of existence, the game got a portion of additional content proving its “games as a service” nature. Still, even from the very release, Apex Legends was flawless for players to enjoy. Innovative and well-elaborated features of the gameplay, decent optimization for various systems, well-thought-out mechanics, beautiful graphics, and many other aspects of the game created a wave of positive feedback from players and critics. This turns out to be the best advertisement so almost everyone with a possibility to try Apex did so.

Let’s not forget one significant fact — Apex Legends is free-to-play. It’s quite a seduction for owners of PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or a gaming PC to download it and enter the matches — even if they aren’t really into the Battle Royale genre.

Anthem: Under Construction

This creation of the BioWare company is like opposition to Apex in its business strategy. It’s also a “game as a service”, but it was delivered to the community so differently. Anthem has a full price for a AAA-title, it’s release was postponed many times, and the overall quality of the final release is absolutely unsatisfactory. It’s like a nightmare of the No Man’s Sky situation is repeating once again — with the difference that we don’t know whether BioWare will be able to get themselves out of this swamp or not.

The development of Anthem started in 2012(!) and it was a long process. The gaming community became a bit irritated by many promises throughout the years and then by the somewhat weird release. For example, owners of the Xbox One consoles were able to play only for a limited time whilst PC players already had the full version.

At last, we’ve got Anthem on our devices. And what? It seems awfully underdeveloped, with many promised features absent and with many lags ready to spoil our experience. Suddenly, the whole Internet burst with complaints about Anthem. There were even broken PS4 devices because of this game. The developers try to do their best to fix everything, to fill the game with sufficient content, and to satisfy the community. Still, even many potentially great ideas of Anthem can’t be implemented decently. Time is needed to do so, and this time plays against the BioWare reputation — it’s time after the release, you know.

It would be unfair to blame the company on cheating. They have chosen a particular scheme in the game business model — to give players an underdeveloped product and continue the work on it while getting all sorts of feedback from players. I totally believe that Anthem has the potential to reach the same level of perfectness as Apex did, but this can happen only somewhere in the future. The developers got some funds from the primary release, they continue getting money from sells and internal microtransactions. The whole process makes the existence of Anthem possible. So was it clever or not to choose such a business strategy?

Uncertainty of business

It might seem that the strategy of Apex is certainly better and we should repeat it for our projects. On the one hand, it’s quite true — there are lots of amazing moves made by Respawn Entertainment and they definitely are worthy of our attention. On the other hand, it’s rather impossible to succeed in business by just copying someone’s actions. This may work and may not.

It’s one of the distinguishing features of the real-world game of business. We have no certain rules here. If in a business video game, you theoretically can follow a kind of plan and have a guaranteed success. In the dimension of the real world, we have unpredictability to deal with. It makes the situation a bit more interesting and the following success much more exciting.

Apex Legends is an example of:

• an innovative releasing scheme;
• a great level of quality (technical and creative);
• a potentially successful monetization.

We should wait and see the results for this game from a long-term perspective. An excellent start and a quite promising growth in the early stage — this isn’t everything in the game industry. Time here dictates its rules.

It would be too risky to proclaim all the actions around Anthem mistaken. The game has lots of problems from the start and BioWare must do something with powerful negative feedback, try and clear the game’s reputation by amazing new content and efficient bug fixes.

Here are some moments in Anthem to think about:

• gamers become very upset if they don’t get a game in time;
• gamers prefer getting full playing experience for their money, not promises of future excitement (“I’m playing here and now and long life of a “game as a service” is rather about fresh content, not fixing problems”);
• technical issues have the power to kill even good games, a storyline and gameplay mechanics may be unable to save the day.

Starting a new gaming project and moving through the process of its development, we should consider the experience of our predecessors in this area. Anthem and Apex Legends are great lessons to learn from. But they aren’t ultimate at all — in this industry we have quite the freedom to make our own decisions.