Respawn Dev Says Apex Legends Hackers "Achieved Nothing of Value"

Apex Legends was hacked recently by disgruntled Titanfall players who sought to bring attention to Titanfall's own online problems. The hacking efforts resulted in games being unplayable for a while with messages directing Apex Legends players towards a site centered around bringing awareness to Titanfall's problems which include repeated DDoS attacks. While the attack on Apex was indeed inconvenient to its players, Ryan Rigney, the Director of Communications are Respawn Entertainment, suggested the attack wasn't as impactful as the hackers might've hoped by saying "they achieved nothing of value."

Rigney tweeted about the hacking situation as it was happening days ago and followed up again afterwards with more comments reflecting on the situation. He shared an article lambasting the hackers for their attack, and he refuted the insinuations from the savetitanfall.com campaign that said Respawn has been "willingly pretending that they do not know about the situation."

Also: Sunday's attack was tied to an awareness campaign that we've already publicly acknowledged:

Weeks ago: https://t.co/7mc1MTFglo

And earlier: https://t.co/ftHvUy9lmh

The problem's not awareness. It's that DDoSing in particular is just a hard problem to solve. Really hard.

— Ryan K. Rigney (@RKRigney) July 6, 2021

The site orchestrated around "saving" Titanfall in turn suggests that the state of Titanfall equates to an "act of fraud."

"Selling a game that does not work as advertised (not being able to play in this case) without fixing the different issues and ignoring their customers is an act of fraud," savetitanfall.com reads. "It leaves no doubt that Respawn is actively ignoring this subject. Respawn and Electronic Arts have the resources to fix these issues, yet they don't, knowingly continuing to sell a game that does not work as advertised, and doesn't work at all."

The team has never stopped working on DDoS solutions, and anti-cheat is just a never-ending war of whack-a-mole.

On the DDoS front, we WILL solve this. When we do, I promise you it won't be because hackers "made us aware" by ruining a holiday.

They achieved nothing of value.

— Ryan K. Rigney (@RKRigney) July 6, 2021

Rigney continued his comments by saying that the teams haven't ever quit on their anti-DDoS work and that anti-cheat efforts are never-ending, a statement backed up by the growing number of endless bans we see in games like Call of Duty: Warzone and more as cheaters and anti-cheat times go round and round. He ended his thread by saying that the hackers achieved nothing of value with this attack on Apex.

If the intent of the attack was solely for awareness, it could be argued that it was indeed successful since many Apex players who may not care at all about Titanfall at least know about the older game's problems now. However, if you didn't play Titanfall and didn't care before, you likely won't care now if you still don't play play – especially if you now know it has matchmaking problems – so we're back to square one. Players who do care won't be the ones resolving the problems either while the devs work on anti-cheat efforts, so with that in mind, it seems the attack was indeed without value outside of awareness alone.

This likely won't be the end of the Titanfall and Apex drama, so expect to see more from the parties involved in the future.