Electronic Arts might be one of the more controversial AAA video game publishers out there, but it's certainly not the least successful. Despite seeing a revenue dip earlier this year – not unexpected for most games as time goes on – Apex Legends continues to perform well for EA, as does the company's other "live service" games.
Apex Legends has managed to hit a whopping 70 million players "life to date," which is a pretty impressive figure, all things considered. Of course, the rate of growth for the popular first-person shooter/battle royale hybrid has slowed since launch – in the game's first week, it pulled in 25 million players, and that number grew to 50 million by the end of its first month on the market.
Given that its surprise release took place back in February, the growth could be averaged out to around 2.8 million new users per month. That's not quite a Fortnite-level success, but it's respectable.
As we said before, Apex Legends isn't the only game that has strengthened EA's bottom line. According to a company financial report released today for Q2 FY2020, FIFA's Ultimate Team and The Sims 4 both performed above the publisher's expectations, with the latter seeing a monthly player-count boost of "more than 40%" year-over-year – not bad for a life simulator.
EA says it plans to "[double] down" on live services moving forward, so players can undoubtedly expect to see a lot more content for the games mentioned above, as well as a few new titles down the line.
Of course, not all of EA's games are going to be live services. The publisher says it also looks forward to delivering "a lot of fun and excitement" to players this holiday season with games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. For the unaware, Fallen Order will be a purely-singleplayer, microtransaction-free sci-fi adventure set for launch on November 15.