EA announced its decision to bring its popular battle royale gameApex Legendsto mobile devices last year, but fell more or less silent on the subject until its recent third-quarter earnings call. During the call, EA finally confirmed that the release ofApex Legendsfor mobile is moving forward as planned, as EA spent those months of radio silence locking in a publishing partner in China.
Amobile version ofApex Legendsfirst come onto the radar during the game’s season 2 content, but both EA and Respawn had little else to say at the time, and definitely no release date. While there’s still no release date, EA at least offered a few more details as to how the mobileApex Legends’development is currently faring.
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In its Q3 earnings call (the same call during which EA talked about thepower of next-gen consoles), EA revealed that the mobile game isn’t being developed in-house; instead, EA partnered up with a Chinese company to both developApex Legendsmobile for a global release and distribute it in China. According to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen, “Rolling mobile out in China, you need to have a partner, and we’re—as we’ve said in the prepared remarks today—we’re working with a partner there, and we’re very excited about the opportunity. That partner is also helping us develop a mobile Apex for the globe—more to come on that in terms of timing.” EA’s Chinese partner wasn’t actually named in the call and considering it’s fairly early in the partnership, that’s likely the reason that EA doesn’t have a release date for the game yet–although there isa release window.
However, EA has partnered up with Chinese developers on multiple other occasions to roll out mobile versions of its flagship titles, includingFIFA Online 4andNeed for Speed Online. Both of those were made in a partnership with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which itself owns Riot Games, and Tencent is also responsible for the massively successful mobile titleArena of Valor. The conglomerate is currently partnered up with Activision forCall of Duty Mobile, so clearly, Tencent is an old hat at this kind of thing. Whether or not EA’sApex Legendspartner is Tencent once again remains to be seen as EA divulges more information going forward.
At the very least,Apex Legendsfansdohave something in the very near future to look forward to, as thegame’s season 4–titled “Assimilation”–goes live on February 4. Beyond that, fans can at least be assured that the mobile title they so enthusiastically wanted remains a definite reality; it’s coming, but there’ll be a bit of a wait.
Apex Legendsis currently available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
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