Please consider African Apex servers
Hi Respawn team,
I’m an Apex Legends player from Nigeria with many seasons under my belt. I love this game, and I’m asking you to consider bringing Apex game servers to Africa, including evaluating AWS GameLift’s supported hosting locations in Cape Town and Lagos.
EU servers are where I can reliably find matches, but the latency difference between me and players closer to those servers changes the flow of the game completely. It affects which fights I take, how I use cover, and whether I have time to react at all. It feels like a ceiling on how far I can compete, regardless of how much I practise.
The clearest example is fighting someone with a Peacekeeper or Mastiff around cover. I now retreat from those fights because I know what happens: in my experience, I always get knocked before I even see my opponent during the decisive peek. Not sometimes or often—consistently enough that avoiding the fight has become part of how I play.
I’ve invested in a powerful gaming PC and a 300Hz monitor, and I use fibre internet with ExitLag to try to improve my connection. I’ve made a substantial effort to reduce delays on my side, yet these encounters still play out the same way.
In modes like Mixtape, I also experience exchanges where, on my screen, I fire first, see my bullets connect, and hear the impact sounds—then die anyway. I understand that what my client displays is not necessarily the order the server resolves. By the time I see an opponent peek, they have already had the time to aim and fire. Reacting quickly to what’s on my screen can still mean reacting too late to survive.
Apex rewards movement, positioning, aim, and quick reactions. Playing with substantially higher latency means I have less opportunity to use those skills. I can accept losing to someone who plays better. It is much harder to enjoy losing exchanges where I never get a meaningful chance to respond.
AWS’s documentation lists both Cape Town (af-south-1) and the Lagos Local Zone (af-south-1-los-1) as supported remote hosting locations for GameLift Servers. I appreciate that service availability alone doesn’t resolve hardware requirements, capacity, routing, costs, or matchmaking population. Still, with Apex now using GameLift, could you evaluate these locations for an African server deployment or a regional trial?
Even an explanation of the barriers, and what player demand or network evidence would help justify a trial, would give us something concrete to work towards.
I want to play Apex every day, contribute to its growth, and remain part of its passionate community. But this persistent disadvantage makes a game I love increasingly difficult to enjoy. Please give players in Nigeria and across Africa a chance to compete on more equal terms.
Thank you for considering this.
References:
