Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment has opened up a new development studio solely focused on future updates of the popular battle royale game. The announcement comes along the 10 year anniversary of the original studio.
According to Respawn COO Dusty Welch in an interview with GameIndustry.biz, Respawn did not expect Apex Legends to be as big of a hit as it was. In the first eight hours since the game launched, it had 1 million players, followed by 10 million in three days. In its first month, it had reached 50 million players.
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The second studio will be situated in Vancouver and is focused completely on the future development of Apex Legends. The original studio, which is in California, will focus on different projects going forward. This move could be made to alleviate some level of crunch on the California studio, which is regularly working on multiple games at a time.
The move to Vancouver made sense for Respawn because EA already has a campus there, and Respawn is one of EA’s biggest studios. In fact, to this point, Respawn had already had a presence there for the past eight months while slowly adding team members.
As is the case with every other game development team, Respawn Vancouver is currently working on Apex Legends remotely during the current coronavirus pandemic. Season 5 recently launched in the free-to-play game.
