Apex Legends

EA has never disclosed a development budget for this game, and no credible reported figure exists. The launch is the remarkable part: it shipped on 4 February 2019 with no pre-announcement and effectively no marketing spend, revealed the same day through streamers — a strategy Respawn compared to a surprise album release. The results are documented first-hand by EA rather than estimated: Vince Zampella announced 10 million players and a million concurrent within 72 hours, and Drew McCoy confirmed 50 million within the first month. On EA's Q4 FY2019 earnings call Andrew Wilson called it 'the fastest-growing new game we've ever had', noting nearly 30% of its players were new to EA. Note that EA's formal press release for that quarter mentions the launch without breaking out any Apex-specific financials — the numbers come from earnings-call commentary, not the release. Third-party analytics put first-month revenue at about $92 million, then a record for a free-to-play game, but that is a SuperData estimate and not an EA figure. Cumulative revenue passed $1 billion by February 2021 and $2 billion by May 2022, with over 100 million players by April 2021 and a Steam concurrency record of 510,286 in August 2022. The trajectory since has been uneven: EA's CFO said in 2023 that the game 'did not meet our expectations', it reportedly lost around 70% of its Steam player base during 2024, and EA cut roughly 100 roles at Respawn in 2025 with Apex among the affected teams — though EA's FY2026 materials describe it returning to net-bookings growth. The model is free-to-play throughout, funded by cosmetics and a seasonal battle pass introduced with Season 1. Time-to-beat is deliberately empty: a live-service battle royale has no ending.