Inside Realm's million-dollar bet on competitive Apex
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Back in 2020, Realm was a tournament organizer best known for the Summit Series, a transatlantic league that featured a NA-EU grudge match in its finals. After their sponsor backed out in 2021, the planned return of the Summit Series was cancelled.
Realm went back to the drawing board, and in November 2022, CEO Eric Faust announced a fresh concept: the Realm Pro League.
The RPL aims to provide private, solo queue matchmaking, with “daily, monthly, and weekly prizing.” At the beginning of March they announced they’d be handing out over $1 million in prizing in 2023, an extravagant sum given the typical prize pools of third-party tournament offerings.
A debut season of three months that begins today will award $150,000 in cash prizes open to both North America and EMEA, starting what is almost certainly the biggest non-ALGS competition the game has ever seen.
In a Discord call back in November, Faust outlined the story behind Realm’s latest offering and his vision for the company moving forward.
To start, Realm acquired Circus, a similar project for competitive matches in Overwatch that had become popular, and built out from that acquisition to focus on improving the player experience in Apex. “Basically, we knew that at the elite level, grinding all day for ranked has gotten kind of monotonous from a viewership perspective,” said Faust.
They quickly proved that fans of competitive Apex were hungry for new concepts. A beta test in the summer of 2021 generated a lot of interest, with about 5,000 registered accounts and 50,000 total players. For Faust and his team, the big takeaway from the beta was that were was serious demand for the competitive Apex experience—even among players who couldn’t hit nasty one-clips. Amateurs who participated in the beta craved the experience of high-stakes ALGS-style matches just as much as the elite players.
“Even gold players wanted a competitive experience—guys who can't grind thousands of hours in the game, but still get off work and rip a couple hours in the evening. So I realized at every level that there were players that want a competitive experience.”
Realm’s pivot is reminiscent of the offerings provided by FACEIT, the esports platform and tournament provider best known for Counter-Strike, who “aim to further the esports ecosystem by offering players of all levels the chance to compete in a competitive environment.” FACEIT has over 23.5 million players, brings in over $30 million a year in revenue and was bought by the Saudis last year in a $1.5 billion bundle with rival ESL.
That definitive outlet for serious players is missing from the broader Apex ecosystem, and Realm is well-placed to fill the gap. Outside top-tier proving grounds, sweaty lobbies are hard to come by. Season 13’s Ranked Reloaded was an an attempt to push ranked lobbies toward a style of play that was more like ALGS games, but it was eventually scrapped amid complaints about its slow pace. In its current state, ranked games largely fail to deliver that thrill of competition. The complaint is nearly as old as the game itself, but the RP system rewards players who look for kills and grind hundreds of games over the more deliberate strategy and high-stakes plays in tournament lobbies.
Saving Apex ranked?
Despite the plan to eventually include players of all skill levels, it’s important to note that Realm doesn’t see itself as a rival or replacement to your local ranked lobbies. Instead, they’re focused on engagement, with a mission to turn fans from passive consumers of comp Apex into active participants, playing in a competitive ecosystem with rewards of its own.
High-quality metrics are also a part of Realm’s vision. They’ve partnered up with Hedera, a distributed ledger technology similar to blockchain that keeps advanced statistics on players (if they opt in) in the Realm ecosystem. Faust hopes that open access to that treasure trove of juicy data will create opportunities for players without clout or big social media channels to get noticed, mentioning how metrics showed him that Nicholas "Vein" Hobbs was a special player in the Summit Series, well before he won 2021’s ALGS Championship.
By building out this separate ecosystem, Realm is taking a big swing at a tough problem. But in many ways they’ve got it easier than EA and Respawn, who Faust sees as “trying to cater to, like, 100 million plus players, right? Very difficult to cater to everyone in that type of scenario.”
With a narrower focus, Realm offers a silo from that huge variety and number of players, who are all looking for different things out of their Apex games. And by making the experience solo queue, Realm neatly eliminates a major pain point of the ranked experience—trying to fight a coordinated three-stack as a solo player or only playing when the stars align with a three-stack of your own.
Their efforts have already gotten a lot of praise from the EMEA-based pros who were able to jump in early: Elwin "KSWINNIIE" Echeveria, currently on the Element 6 roster, was one of the players involved in Realm’s initial preseason. “Realm is awesome,” he wrote, in response to a Twitter DM asking for feedback. “About to save the EU scene. We barely have any tournaments the whole year except ALGS…being payed to play the game at a high level is just the best thing.”
The Realm solo queue lobbies felt a lot better than ranked games to him as well. While ranked “is just a kill race,” Realm allowed him to practice his skills as an IGL, with “every type of player,” giving Swinnie high-quality practice and improving his game overall. Cole "Rkn" Prommel and Beau "RamBeau" Sheidy had similarly good experiences with Realm when they were able to jump in before the London LAN.
Realm isn’t the only organizer on the Apex scene that has seen the potential in catering to players thirsty for the highs and lows of competitive lobbies. Prominent Apex enjoyer Jon “Falloutt” Kefaloukos is taking a break from casting ALGS at the moment and working on a project called Apex Rising, a forthcoming “middle-tier opportunity for comp Apex Players, content creators, and rising stars to compete” that he sees as a missing layer between ranked games and the ALGS.
Though obviously different things, it’s gratifying to see how both Realm and Falloutt’s project are pushing toward a broader, more inclusive vision of what competitive Apex could look like.
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