As Epic did before it with Fortnite, Respawn Entertainment has knocked it out of the park with its own entry into the battle royale genre. Since arriving back in February, Apex Legends has attracted an enormous amount of attention, bringing in tens of thousands of viewers on streaming platforms like Twitch – even beating out its competitor on several occasions – and amassing a whopping 50 million players in roughly a month.
That’s a lot of people logging in to see what all the fuss is about, and given how competitive the game is, it’s only understandable that folks are doing everything they can to get an edge up on their opponents. But it seems that some players have now gone a bit too far, as Respawn’s announced that they’ve had no problem laying down the ban hammer over the past month.
Taking to Reddit the other week, they revealed that in its first 10 or so days on the market, already 16,000 people had been banned from Apex Legends.
“As of today over 16,000 cheaters have been identified and banned from the game,” wrote the developer. “Cheaters suck. If you run into one, please try and capture the evidence and let us know here.”
Obviously, every competitive game – especially one that’s taken the world by storm like Apex Legends has – is going to find itself with cheaters. It’s inevitable, really. And while we don’t imagine Respawn’s actions will put an end to this type of thing permanently, it’s nice to see that they’re at least aware of what’s going on and won’t tolerate it.
Not only that, but given that the developer apparently has pretty big post-launch plans for Apex Legends, it’s clear that they’re fully committed to the road ahead. Because let’s face it, no one – and we really mean no one – could’ve predicted that it’d amass 50 million users after just four weeks. The challenge now, though, is to keep those gamers happy and engaged, and knocking out the cheaters is certainly one way to do that.
