Word of mouth is extremely strong and has an extremely large range this day and era.
People tend to talk about things they think other people don't know about, sharing it on social media, paradoxically making it more known.
10,000,000 players in less than a month. Zero trailers or journalist coverage before hand; just vague murmurs about Titanfall 3.
By circumventing the conventional means of marketing Apex Legends might have just stumbled into the next evolution of marketing.
For example: If Apex had came out with the traditional market structure. (a big reveal, and a few months time before release.) Things would have gone very differently.
People would be saying to each other:
>Oh, that game is by EA.
>That game has micro-transactions.
>That game doesn't have the things Titanfall had.
>It's just another Battle Royale.
>/v/ would be complaining about the pozz.
>Everyone would find something to hate.
It's clear that the industry is full of scams, exploitation, and fraud these days and most people know it.
Even on /v/, anons spend half of their threads talking about the "meta" of the industry, rather than the games themselves. (Thus the phrase "/v/ doesn't talk about video games")
The sheer amount of money and technology being thrown into the industry has grown so large that consumers have become hyper-aware of what goes on in the industry.
Even on the normalfag level.
So what Respawn has decided to do is not given consumers time to reflect on the game. I'm pretty sure that this was Respawn's call and not EA's. The Titanfall fandom is completely heart-broken right now, and Respawn knew that they would be very vocally displeased with Apex. This is also why i think the leak was a real leak because the devs knew that "Titanfall BattleRoyale" was the last thing TF players were wanting to hear. The leak only came out Post too long. Click here to view the full text.