Respawn Entertainment’s Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale shooter, has caused a storm in its three-week life span. It’s surpassed 25 million downloads, held its first tournament, and even inadvertently caused the sales of a virtual reality game to take off.
Even though Apex is on the Origin platform on PC, and it’s free—as a direct result of its success, it’s led to an increase of 4,000 percent hits to the Apex Construct Steam page. It’s resulted in the virtual reality game, developed by Fast Travel Games, and going for $29.99, selling more units in China in the last two weeks, than all of 2018.
“Not only does the name [Apex Legends] resemble our own VR game Apex Construct, the logos are also strikingly similar,” Andreas Juliusson, the marketing and communications manager at Fast Travel Games, wrote on Reddit.
Although it looks like good news for the relatively small studio, based in Sweden, Stockholm, unfortunately it has “received a lot of negative user reviews from Chinese buyers who feel they have been scammed, even though we [Fast Travel Games] have done nothing wrong,” wrote Juliusson.
Apex is still not available in China, however it looks like that may change soon, according to the South China Morning Post. Tencent Holdings, the company behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite in China, is reportedly “in talks” with Electronic Arts to make the game available in near future.
For the time being it’s left Chinese players anxiously waiting, biting their nails, and doing everything they can, to get their hands on Apex. And this has evidently equated to them purchasing the Apex Construct VR game, that coincidentally has a similar name.
