Respawn Entertainment has penned a lengthy mea culpa on Reddit, admitting that it broke its promise by adding punishing and expensive loot box mechanics to Apex Legends‘ Iron Crown event.
The Iron Crown event went live earlier this week, bringing with it a number of cool new skins that were locked behind the controversial system. The resulting backlash was swift, and so was Respawn’s course correction.
“At launch we made a promise to players that we intend to do monetization in a way that felt fair and provided choice to players on how they spent their money and time,” the developer wrote on Reddit. “A core decision during development of Apex Legends was that we wanted to make a world class battle royale game – in quality, depth, progression, and important for today’s conversation – how we sell stuff. With the Iron Crown event we missed the mark when we broke our promise by making Apex Packs the only way to get what many consider to be the coolest skins we’ve released.”
Respawn outlined its next steps as follows:
- Starting on 8/20, we’ll be adding and rotating all twelve of the event-exclusive Legendary items into the store over the course of the final week of the event for the regular Legendary skin cost of 1,800 Apex Coins. You will still be able to purchase Iron Crown Apex Packs for 700 Apex Coins if you choose. The store schedule for the week will be as follows:
Respawn concluded its mea culpa by promising that it’ll do better and acknowledging that its communication needs to be more transparent.
For more on Apex Legends, check out our previous coverage.
[Source: Reddit]
