Apex Legends sees staggering increase in negative reviews following premium battle pass debacle

Changes are coming to the battle pass system in Apex Legends, and the reception is about as negative as you might expect on Steam.

It was announced that beginning next season, battle passes will be split in two but will still cost the same money. While there are key changes that will give players that buy both battle passes more rewards than before, many just think they’ll have to pay even more money for what they already have, and to make matters worse, they can only be purchased with real world money and not in-game currency. The reactions to the initial announcement were already negative, and now those same reactions are spilling over into official reviews as well. When looking at the Steam community page for Apex Legends, many of the most recent reviews have signal the beginning of a review score tailspin.

The reviews pouring into the page all have the same complaint: Players think EA and Respawn are being greedy and the monetization of the game is ruining everyone’s enjoyment. Some reviews are even going as far as to say that they are going to quit playing the game altogether if the companies focus more on taking money out of players’ pockets instead of trying to fix real issues the game is having, like cheaters and a ranked system that top players have consistently complained about. While all reviews still stand at a Mostly Positive ranking, the most recent reviews now stand at Mixed.

Will the influx in bad reviews prompt a change of heart from EA and Respawn? The chances are slim, as it would need to be as big of a movement as the Helldivers 2 review bombing fiasco that prompted Sony to drop a mandatory PSN account requirement when the backlash became too severe to ignore. But bad reviews likely won’t change anything on their own—the only way the new battle pass system goes away quickly is if players don’t buy it.