Season 13 of Apex Legends has been struggling to garner positive sentiment among the wider Apex community in the face of slow patches and unaddressed bugs. With the recent release of the Summer Sundown sale and player perception believing developer Respawn is putting greater focus on the game’s premium cosmetics over bug-fixing patches, frustrated Apex players are calling for a boycott.
The movement first started gaining traction on Reddit and has since spread into the wider online community. Clips of server desync and damage failing to register against opponents have been topping the Apex Legends subreddit for the past week, culminating in posts suggesting that players should go on strike in August and attempt to push for change through a sizeable dip in player counts.
“If we somehow reduce these numbers by half (from 300k peak to 150k), I think that would be a good push for Respawn to fix the game and takes things seriously,” Reddit user u/Reza_SL wrote in one post pointing to the game’s current daily users. But they also admitted that “only a tiny portion of the player base knows about this” and that proponents of the strike would have to work hard to convince the wider audience to join them.
While “No Apex August” has been a catchy tagline that’s stuck among the boycott’s organizers, other players have suggested their target should be more specific. In another post, u/MrFeature_1 instead argues that the strike should really be “No Apex Store August.” “If you stop playing Apex Legends in August, it will most likely do nothing. Because people who pay for the game (buy skins, etc) will still play,” they explain. “BUT, if you convince people to not spend any money for the entire month – that will have exponentially bigger impact.”
Posts like this have attracted thousands of upvotes on the subreddit and have been widely shared on TikTok and Twitter. But more cynical players believe that the attempt at organizing through these online spaces will have little impact on improving Apex’s current state.
“So sick of seeing the no apex august posts and watching people try to convince themselves on an irrational dream,” another user wrote on the subreddit. “There are 2.1 million players on this sub list, if everyone on this sub is a daily player we are only 20% of total DAILY players and only 1.6% of total players. While the game isn’t in a perfect place acting like 1.6% of the players not playing for one month is going to get all the fixes you want done is a pipe dream.”
Whether it truly is a pipe dream or inspires Respawn to redouble its efforts on patching the game’s omnipresent bugs remains to be seen, but player frustration at the current state of things is palpable in their attempts to build a strike against Apex’s current trajectory. A similar movement formed around the game’s ranked mode last year when the hashtag #SaveApexRanked went viral on Twitter following anger around the state of the game being voiced by some of its most prominent content creators.
