In what was the culmination of a bad week for Respawn Entertainment’s Apex Legends’ development team, their ‘We’re Sorry’ post on the r/apexlegends subreddit soon turned into a battlefield – one developer versus dozens of commenters who were voicing their disdain over the Iron Crown microtransactions.
The Iron Crown Event was a highly anticipated community event with new skins and a new game mode introduced to Apex Legends Season 2. However, when the fans caught on that the event would cost someone around $200 if they wanted to access all the content, the fallout was enormous.
As a result, one developer on reddit began to answer people’s comments. A lot of them. Respawn Entertainment has a reputation to remain quite stoic across reddit and social media, but the reaction to the event was so negative I can imagine a bunch of devs in the office drawing straws to see who had to handle the mess.
It was Drew McCoy, the Lead Developer on Apex Legends, who had the lucky task of dealing with the chaos. The responses to avid gamers were not brilliantly executed. Terms like ‘freeloaders’, ‘ass-hats’ and ‘dicks’ were used half in jest and half as quite a derogatory slew of insults against a gaming community totally sick of microtransactions.
One particular comment – pictured above – highlights the developer’s point of view. There is an argument here for both sides of the outrage, and the obvious should be noted: Reddit, especially gaming subreddits, is not known for its empathetic commenters and rational thinkers.
However, the irony in the dev’s statements (about not engaging with temper tantrums and the ‘good old days’ of game development) was not lost on the community, adding further fuel to the fire rather than presenting an accurate mindset of the team behind Apex Legends.
To be fair to the team, the consistent attacks on the devs from members of the community have inevitably harmed a team of developers who are working on a game they love, and it’s likely why Respawn’s communication on the platform has been notoriously quiet as of late.
It also makes sense, their task has been a tricky one. They’re a Triple A studio supported by EA, one of the most hated publishers in the industry, with little to no experience of handling a live game service. Then they suddenly have a game with almost 50 million players demanding new content and updates. The pressure must have been immense over the last few months.
As of yet Respawn hasn’t made an announcement about the dev’s comments.
