Respawn Entertainment put his family before the game, which saw the game pushed a touch.

Last year, Apex Legends from Respawn Entertainment launched randomly on February 4, 2019, quite late in the day. A rather peculiar time to just launch a title, but everyone just shrugged and accepted it and got neck-deep in the new Battle Royale experience from the Titanfall developer. This month, the reasoning behind the release has come to light.

Jon Shiring, the Lead Programmer for Apex Legends posted a Twitter thread explaining the release date, and it’s pretty much adorable. Last week, he signed paperwork to finalize his daughter’s adoption. This saw him reflecting back to the release of Apex.

Last year, Jon had a court appointment to finalize the adoption scheduled for February 4, 2019, at 10am, which was the time when Apex Legends was originally planned to launch. It turns out that Respawn Entertainment decided to push the launch of the unannounced, secret game that would later rack up over 1 million players in under 8 hours.

We had planned it for that morning, and then my court appointment to finalize my adoption came through - the court had picked February 4th at 10am - the same time as the Apex launch. I panicked. Since I ran the ops and online services team for the game, this was bad.

— ░〚GW〛 Jon 'slothy' Shiring ░ (@jonshiring) October 8, 2020

This is certainly a lovely thing to do, rather than pushing the game live and passing the task onto another employee in the team to stick to a planned time. Family matters are more important and so it’s great to hear this story about a game that I’m still enjoying to this day. There’s also the added benefit that not announcing a release date/time gives you the freedom to push things when necessary.

Apex Legends is currently available for free on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. It’s due to be heading to the Nintendo Switch sometime soon, and the latest update has seen the game finally get its cross-play beta.



Posted: Oct 14, 2020 4:54 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/apex-legends-release-time-detailed-by-lead-programmer/