The truth is Respawn is in the business of making money, and Apex Legends’ method of selling cosmetic items is a superior business model to Titanfall’s traditional pay-once, play-forever standard – especially when Apex Legends has millions of active players compared to Titanfall’s mere thousands. There’s a palpable amount of irony in the developer being able to quickly put a stop to the exact same method of hacking that has plagued Titanfall for years. Such petty behavior is never warranted, but I share the annoyance and impatience with Respawn. Titanfall fans weren’t too pleased, and it led one fan to initiate DDoS attacks on Apex Legends in retaliation. In July, Respawn community coordinator Jason Garza let it slip that only two employees were attempting to resolve this issue, whereas hundreds of developers plug away every day at the company’s moneymaker, Apex Legends. Essentially, grudge-holding hackers have been rendering Titanfall unplayable for the past two years. For online games, this either leads to players being unable to connect at all or results in horrible latency wherein button presses are acknowledged seconds late. Without getting overly technical, a “DDoS attack” occurs when a hacker floods a server with superfluous requests to overload the system and prevent it from fulfilling legitimate requests. Most people abandoned Titanfall in favor of the sequel, but the chances of it thriving in any capacity were ruined by Respawn’s failure to address years of constant distributed denial of service attacks. It’s not much compared to the hundreds of thousands playing Fortnite on a constant basis, but it’s something. Today, Titanfall 2 enjoys a modest player base, with a few thousand gamers online at any given time. It enjoyed a much warmer reception for its better-balanced multiplayer gameplay and invigorating single-player story, but its sales struggled due to stiff competition – the title was released one week before Battlefield 1 and one week before Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, two heavy-hitters occupying the same genre. Respawn Entertainment took note of the criticism when it released Titanfall 2 two years later. You were either throwing down against other gamers online, or you weren’t playing Titanfall at all. However, its player base fizzled out within months despite an incredible amount of hype – the biggest gripe from many being the lack of a dedicated single-player campaign. 2014’s Titanfall promised to be an epic multiplayer arena shooter combining mech warfare with acrobatic foot soldier combat, and it did just that. I’ve written about the series, and I admit I’m a big fan. Respawn Entertainment, best known for Apex Legends, Titanfall and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, took to Twitter to announce that the first Titanfall would be removed from all digital storefronts and discontinued from subscription services such as EA Play in March. December kicked off with some of the most conflicting video game news I’ve heard in months.
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