The competitive edge to selling F2P games.
Let's be straight here. Respawn has consistently decided to throw away their marketing potential and company growth with stubbornness to accept competitive gaming trends. Selling free to play games often depends a lot on having recognizable players competiting. League, Pubg, dota, CS, r6s, ow, have a similar theme where players WANT to play the game, not only because the mechanics are fun but also because they can show their skills and have a place in a competitive scene. Companies in generally need to have several things happen to have a blockbuster free-to-play project- Consistent microtransactions, a steady and somewhat always growing player base, and content that pushes people to keep playing and paying for content. People want to look good while playing well.
One of the problems i'm noticing is that many of my friends who are competitive paid gamers are going back to pubg and not wanting to play apex for 3 reasons-
1. No way to mark progression (no ladder, no ranked system)
2. Difficulty in setting up a tournament for APEX
3. Clear signs of a developed league where players shine.
Given this as the status quo, I think it's worth talking actual numbers and the current system.
Right now the largest apex tournaments are based on running over noob players. They are done by code red offering around 50k. Since there are no custom games, it's just about how many wins you get and how many
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A good solid tournament base would be as follows-
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12 steady teams.
8 teams invited from placements in an open competitive leagues
3 seasons a year played 10 months of a year.
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Let's assume 3 lans a year. With travel costs for 72 players (12 teams and their coaches + 8 3 man teams) Using code-red staff to host these 3 tournaments.
1300 per person travel costs on average, with about 500 more per person for hotels and their time.
(1300*72)~100k. Renting a facility and providing for respawn staff about another 70k.
~(170k*3) so about 700k a year with taxes and such. just covering these expenses.
Next let's say that you have a graded payout on a 2 million dollar basis. with team rank being labeled as j and each payout is ~100 times lowest payout exponentiallly, payout=(exp^(4.6*teamrank/total teams)*((total payout-(20 teams*base_payoutperteam))/((sum(exp^(4.6*teamrank/total_teams)*total_teams))+base_payoutperteam
20-12,825
19-13,361
18-14,230
17-15,323
16-16,701
15-18,433
14-20,614
13-23,359
12-26,814
11-31,162
10-36,635
9-43,523
8-52,192
7--63,102
6-76,835
5-94,118
4-115,871
3-143,249
2-177,708
1-221,077
This means that you need approximately 1/10th of the player base willing to by a pass for about 7 dollars for it to be self-sustaining and keep a healthy player base. With the final lan being a competitive custom game.
All of this is relatively doable and within the constraints of what you can do to create a competitive scene that keeps the game's player base both happy and offer solutions towards providing a long term development that can compete with other pvp shooters on the market. This could simply be added as part of the season 2 roadmap and would provide the first real competitive experience offered by respawn, while still promoting development and sales for future respawn projects. PLEASE CONSIDER KEEPING THE COMPETITIVE PLAYER BASE ACTIVE.
