Battle Passes: A Deep Dive

Earlier this month, the developers of the popular Battle Royale game, Apex Legends announced that they would make significant changes to its battle pass model starting in the game’s upcoming season 22. In short, they are going to remove the ability for players to purchase a battle pass using in-game currency, and they are going to introduce two battle passes per season, each costing $10 USD.

At the time of recording this, neither EA or Respawn have commented on the community backlash, but a lot of people expect one of two things to happen. One, the developers will come back with an apology and announce a slightly better plan, which was supposed to be the original plan all along, and this controversial plan which no one likes was only meant to make the original plan feel better. We have seen this happen many times before. Or two, the controversial plan will actually be implemented, because the developers know that the people complaining online are only a vocal minority, and the majority of the player base will continue playing the game and maybe even buy a lot of these new battle passes.

Either way, it’s not really a good time to be playing Apex Legends as your main game. A lot has already been said about this controversial update and I don’t really want to to discuss more about that in particular. Moving on from that controversy, this made me think a lot about battle passes as a whole. Battle passes as a business model in video games have become so common that we are no longer surprised to see them in most new games these days. They started gaining popularity because they offered what we thought was a good alternative to lootboxes, because you always knew what you were buying with your money, unlike lootboxes where you paid money without knowing what you would get in return.

But little did we know that the battle pass system would bring problems of its own, and the sad thing is, we currently don’t have a replacement system in sight. In this video, let’s spend a little time looking into the origins of this monetisation model, why publishers and developers are so reliant on it, and how it hurts the consumers in the long term.