Apex Legends has never been shy about borrowing from other worlds. Its latest guest, though, is a strange one for a shooter: a fighting game.
The Street Fighter 6 Crossover event is live today. It brings the fighting styles of well-known Street Fighter characters into Respawn's free-to-play battle royale. The original report names Chun-Li, Ryu, Akuma and Dhalsim among the headliners. That's a lineup built for recognition, and it reaches right back to the series' most familiar faces.
The pitch is simple. Take a game built on gunfights and cover, and let players throw hands instead.
About three months ago, Bungie released what it called the "final" update for its free-to-play shooter. That move put the game into maintenance mode, which in live-service terms usually means the lights stay on but nobody is building anything new. The general reading, and it was a reasonable one, was that Bungie had closed the book and moved on to other projects.
That reading now looks premature. Last Thursday, Bungie posted a letter on its official site, and it tells a very different story. It's the kind of announcement that's easy to miss if you had already stopped checking for Destiny news. Plenty of people probably had.
That sentence would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago, when live service was the default model for almost every multiplayer shooter. But id Software's arena shooter is now removing the storefront, the battle passes and the currencies, and asking new players for a flat ten dollars instead. It is a quiet, unusual move, and it tells us a fair bit about where the game stands today.
A shooter that never quite caught on
If you had forgotten Quake Champions existed, you are not alone. The PvP arena shooter released in 2022 as a free-to-play title, and it never really became the phenomenon its pedigree suggested it might. Many players treated it as a passing curiosity: something to try for a weekend before moving on. Its concurrent player numbers on Steam reflect that, even though the game has shipped a remarkable 30 seasons of content.
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