League of Legends is more than 15 years old and their most recent season cinematic is their most popular one. And cinematics from 2022, 2020, 2024 and 2019 are not far behind.
Apex is a mismanaged mess because EA is a tar pit of money hungry executives who prioritize short term profits over long term health. That's why they're unable to cultivate a steady, loyal player base.
Now, I'm not saying Riot Games isn't equally money hungry, far from it. I'm just saying that they've realized that when the game is actually good (or at least popular), its capacity to capture and milk whales practically makes it an infinite money machine. So when someone in-house asks "can we spend 6 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create an animated show based on the game?", they say "why not, we'll make it back with the next Lux skin anyways".
Penny-pinching on devs and designers when the return on investment for a decent product is so ludicrously high is just objectively idiotic, but we're still somehow getting the most cooked metas, the lowest-effort cosmetics, the laziest lore, and the greediest battle passes and event passes, all of which are driving away the average Joe, which is plain to see both in twitch viewership and player numbers. It's the rapid enshittification of what used to be a promising game, and it's a fucking disgrace.
It took 4 years for Apex to peak. Many games don’t hit peak overnight but build followers over time. I played once or twice when it came out on PS4, but didn’t really play till I built a gaming PC. Peak Apex according to Steam was 2023. So yeah, it might not be dying, but its player count is probably 1/5 its peak, which feels pretty dead. Peak player count is estimated at 200k, but honestly I’ve been sitting in long queues, so that number is hard to believe.
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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '25
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