EA announced its decision to bring its popular battle royale game Apex Legends to mobile devices last year, but fell more or less silent on the subject until its recent third-quarter earnings call. During the call, EA finally confirmed that the release of Apex Legends for mobile is moving forward as planned, as EA spent those months of radio silence locking in a publishing partner in China.
A mobile version of Apex Legends first come onto the radar during the game's season 2 content, but both EA and Respawn had little else to say at the time, and definitely no release date. While there's still no release date, EA at least offered a few more details as to how the mobile Apex Legends' development is currently faring.
In its Q3 earnings call (the same call during which EA talked about the power of next-gen consoles), EA revealed that the mobile game isn't being developed in-house; instead, EA partnered up with a Chinese company to both develop Apex Legends mobile for a global release and distribute it in China. According to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen, "Rolling mobile out in China, you need to have a partner, and we’re—as we’ve said in the prepared remarks today—we’re working with a partner there, and we’re very excited about the opportunity. That partner is also helping us develop a mobile Apex for the globe—more to come on that in terms of timing." EA's Chinese partner wasn't actually named in the call and considering it's fairly early in the partnership, that's likely the reason that EA doesn't have a release date for the game yet--although there is a release window.
However, EA has partnered up with Chinese developers on multiple other occasions to roll out mobile versions of its flagship titles, including FIFA Online 4 and Need for Speed Online. Both of those were made in a partnership with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which itself owns Riot Games, and Tencent is also responsible for the massively successful mobile title Arena of Valor. The conglomerate is currently partnered up with Activision for Call of Duty Mobile, so clearly, Tencent is an old hat at this kind of thing. Whether or not EA's Apex Legends partner is Tencent once again remains to be seen as EA divulges more information going forward.
At the very least, Apex Legends fans do have something in the very near future to look forward to, as the game's season 4--titled "Assimilation"--goes live on February 4. Beyond that, fans can at least be assured that the mobile title they so enthusiastically wanted remains a definite reality; it's coming, but there'll be a bit of a wait.
Apex Legends is currently available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
Source: EA