Connecting the Dots Inside Live Service Support, with Respawn Ent’s Julie Banta

I applied for one role as a solutions architect over in EA IT…I said, “Why the hell not?”…I shot my shot…[and] the rest is history.—Julie Banta

Last June, Julie Banta, director of the build and release team on Respawn Entertainment’s massive hit, Apex Legends, caught up with Greg Posner, Player Driven’s founder.

“The way that I describe my team and what we do,” Banta told Posner at the top of their podcast exchange, “is we’re really responsible for that very tail end of getting the game out the door…Somebody has to get the game out the door to our players!”

There’s a lot of ‘em out there too.

Apex Legends, a first-person hero shooter that debuted in early 2019, hit 100 million players in the first half of 2021, according to Wikipedia. As of mid-November 2026, the game was still a top-10 performer by revenue on Valve’s U.S. Steam store.

When the “live bugs come” in, added Banta, “our team is the one that springs into action and determines, ‘Hey, how are we going to fix this? What’s the best way, of the many levers that we have,’” that will be the fastest and the best for our players?

“It's a little problem solving, it's a little tactical,” she continued. “It's fast problem solving, which I really enjoy and…this piqued my interest in the beginning.”

“We also have to make sure that everything inside the house—in terms of making sure our developers and our engineers and our artists have everything that they need to be able to do, you know, their tests, and make sure that what we're sending out there—is valid for our players.”

Posner nodded.

“You’re on the front line,” he said. “If there’s a hot fix or something that needs to come quick, you need to be ready to jump into action…”

The metaphor was apt.

In a typical Apex Legends match, players team up in squads of three and skydive into a shrinking battle royale map that contains 60 players. It’s mayhem for the next 15-20 minutes, as the eventual winning team emerges from the frenetic battle…that happens to include Godzilla atm.

Apex Legends is published by Electronic Arts (EA) and is set in the Titanfall universe. The free-to-play title puts a twist on the hero shooter subgenre: It allows players to revive fallen teammates by collecting their cards and taking them to a…wait for it… respawn point.

“Apex Legends is really unique,” Banta told Posner, in that “we always have our ear to the ground for our players. We're listening for where the pain points are, not just in bugs, but things that we can improve quickly.”

“We're like, ‘Okay, we have this thing has been identified, call build and release because we got to get something out as soon as possible.’”

The support teams “throw up the bat signal, if you will,” she said, and the build and release team dons black capes, lots of eye makeup, and cool utility belts.

Player Driven’s Design Desk will break up the exchange between Banta and Posner into two parts. We’ll swoop into two topics below: The skills that Banta uses to run the build and release process for Apex Legends, and her path from…insurance…into EA.

Next week, the focus will shift into how external inputs feed into Respawn’s build and release process (i.e., from social media), and how Banta approaches life-work balance as well her interest in bringing about a gamer community that’s more inclusive.

Banta’s path into gaming actually began with an internship she landed at USAA, a Texas-based insurer that services people in the armed services, vets, and their families.

“You're a Florida Gator,” Posner said to Banta early in the podcast. “As a Gator coming out of college, what was your kind of thought process of what you wanted to be doing for a living?”

“At Florida,” she responded, “I was a double major for finance and for information systems. And I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with that.”

Banta indeed graduated from the University of Florida circa 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in IT and finance.

“Did I want to go, you know, to big banks? I lived in New York at the time. I could, you know, go into the city every day like my dad did, right? Be like a finance bro or whatever…Or do I want to get more into the tech space and utilize the information system side of my degree?”

“That's, ultimately, what I decided to do,” she said. “I applied for a bunch of internships across the board and I ended up getting the one at USAA.”

“Their goal is to take those interns and hire them full time. That is a huge pipeline along with, you know, their veteran’s pipelines. But their out of college pipeline is huge for their engineers…That's how I was able to get the job full time there.”

“I was a hands-on engineer for about a year,” she recalled. “Then I started to kind of pivot because of…my business acumen.”

“I wanted to get an MBA.”

She’d eventually get an MBA, circa 2020, also from the University of Florida.

“I have that skill set where I feel that I can translate really well between technical speak, on what my engineers are trying to say, versus requirements and business value…That was my sweet spot.”

USAA “started pulling me more into architectural conversations, more early in the pipeline of development of, ‘Hey, how are we going to solve this problem? How long is it going to take?’”

“So, I got into architecture…I was a systems architect for several years. And, you know, I love San Antonio. San Antonio has a special place in my heart, but it's little too sleepy for me. Go Spurs, for sure! But it was just not the best fit for me.”

“I started looking at jobs in Austin,” Banta reminisced. “It's like 70 miles from San Antonio.”

“I looked and I saw EA had an office in Austin.”

“I have always had a passion for games,” Banta confided. I “had a GameCube and a PS1 growing up…I have vivid memories of my dad playing Sega Genesis growing up, and I would watch, like, at…four years old, watch him, you know, throw Scar over Pride Rock…on The Lion King, right?”

Spoiler alert: Sorry, Scar! Images courtesy of a YouTube video posted by Carls493 showing The Lion King’s climax (the Sega Genesis title debuted in 1994).

“Video games [have] always been my passion, and when I knew I wanted to move and change jobs, I started looking at jobs that I had more of a passion for. I'm not military. I don't have that drive and that passion, like a lot of USAA members and employees do. I wanted to find something where I could feel that same passion.”

She saw the open IT role and EA and took a shot.

“That’s how I got here,” Banta told Posner. “That’s how got my foot in the door” of the videogame industry.

Now that the door’s ajar, let’s throw it wide open, shall we? Please restack and subscribe if you haven’t yet done so!

To Everything (At Respawn) There Is a Season, Turn, Turn, Turn!

So, that just never stops…What people may not realize is [that] just because we have our eyes on the finish line for, you know, Season 26, in this case…Season 25 is still alive and kicking.—Julie Banta

An early question Player Driven ’s Founder, Greg Posner, put to Respawn’s Director of Build and Release, Julie Banta, involved the skills she’s needed “on a day-to-day basis to help accomplish what you need to” do to keep the Apex Legends machine humming along.

“For a live service game,” began Banta, “you have to wear many hats. Do I manage our roadmap and our workloads for the individual engineers? Yes. Am I also involved in conversations that are pretty technical, of how can we make things better for internal development or get content to our players faster? I'm involved in that too.”

“I'm also involved in some of the more product-related conversations of, ‘Okay…what are some of the things that we want to solve? What are some of the problems…?’ And then you're also project management-esque, right? I put on a Scrum Master hat every once in a while.”

Scrum is a term that came out of rugby, but in an IT context, it’s a lightweight framework that’s used to help product teams overcome complex problems by working incrementally toward solutions by way of an adaptable, clear, accountable process.

“Why I...love a live service game,” she continued, “is because everyone has to jump in and do what needs to be done, right? There's no pausing a season, right? That's not acceptable.”

Rodger that.

Currently, Apex Legends is early in season 31, Cipher. It’ll run from November through next January. Season 32 will kick off in February—it should feature a new legend (a playable hero), Tempest, and the game’s ranked play system will reported be revamped as well—and Banta’s build and release team will undoubtedly be riding the back of a tiger the whole time.

SteamBD’s peak daily users chart for Apex Legends includes markers for the start of each new season. As can be seen above, these updates have arrived consistently every three months for years, and they’ve generally led to a spike in returning players. It doesn’t show the full picture since the game’s available on consoles and other PC platforms, but peak daily users on Steam have averaged about 250,000 for the past 2+ years (which generally lands it on Steam’s top ten).

“If someone needs to jump in and facilitate…a product-related conversation, great, happy to do that,” Banta added. “I do like the fact that I can take my architectural background, and small bits of engineering background, and be able to have intelligent conversations with the people around me, and say, ‘Hey, you know, what problem are we trying to solve, and how can we actually solve these problems? What technologies are at our disposal to be able to, again, get content out to players faster?’”

In her role, Banta necessarily coordinates the work of Apex Legends’ Build and Release team with the efforts of QA, Online Services, Game Engineering, and Production.

Posner wondered what her day looked like as a new season approached.

“It's probably no different than a lot of live service games,” she responded. “We're in full testing overload, right? Now is the time for our QA partners…to catch, you know, the big rocks, right? So testing is happening. We're finding those high-priority bugs and blockers and trying to get them in [patched] before launch.”

“The other people that we’re actually talking with would be, you know, our partners at Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft, right? You don’t just take the game and throw it on the Xbox Marketplace.”

“You have to get approval,” she clarified. You have to make sure that a game…[It] can't be so large that it's going to take up somebody's entire disk space on their console.”

“You need to make sure that it's stable. You need to make sure…[the] icon for the game store is legit.”

“We’re really close with our producers and our live production team,” she said, turning back to the internal action. “They’re just keeping their ears to the ground…Even though we have another season coming up, there’s still one out right now.”

When Banta and Posner spoke, Apex Legends was in the midst of Season 25, Prodigy. It ran from May–August, 2025. A fan wiki has more deets; that season featured a new legend, Sparrow.

“We need to make sure that any new things that come up” in Season 25 are still successfully addressed. “Feedback that we’re getting from our players is still coming through the pipeline” even late in a season.

Season 26, Showdown, featured a new mode named Wildcard. The simpler, shorter variant of the standard battle royale design has 30-player matches, allows legends to be stacked/duplicated, and slashed downed player respawn cooldown times.

Left: Apex Legend’s Season 25 featured a new legend Sparrow, a 20-year-old Italian archer. Right: A screenshot from Season 26’s release trailer, which introduced Wildcard, a faster/tighter battle royale mode. (EA’s shorthand version of each season is here.)

“Are you working with customer support?” Posner wondered. “Do you ask, ‘Hey, what are you hearing directly from players?’ Or you’re mostly taking a look at…the back end and making sure everything’s clicking properly?”

“Our support teams,” Banta responded, “are really the ones who are coming to us. I think all that data is really interesting. I almost wish I was more involved, but we have a whole team of specialists who are the ones listening.”

Note: We’ll swoop into Respawn’s external player community listening process next week.

Drinking From a Firehose During COVID

We had to really make it work [at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic]. And the other interesting part about this was it was my way to learn about all the different departments, even within EA, because we're trying to get people safely back into an office, and utilize different technologies to do that. It's legal. It's workplace experience. It's people experience. It's security. It's IT.—Julie Banta

Banta’s path to the director’s chair of Apex Legends’ build and release team wasn’t a straight line from IT architecture at USAA. As alluded to in the introduction, there was an intermediary stop at EA’s IT department. This was in the 2020-2022 timeframe, when she was living and working in the Austin, Texas area.

Posner revisited this role with Banta in last June’s exchange.

“When you first got into EA,” he wondered, were you “working for EA technical or was it specifically Respawn?”

“It was purely central EA IT,” she said. It “was called Employee Experience, specifically, for what we called collaboration and productivity tools. The extra interesting piece about my start at EA was my first day was in March, 2020.”

Yikes!

“If you throw your memory back—right?—we started hearing about this thing, this virus, COVID.”

“My boss, who I'm actually still very, very close with…he was like, ‘Oh, you know, we might have to work from home for a little while.’ The same conversations everybody was having…for anyone who worked in an office.”

Two weeks later, you know, everything shut down. And my role changed to ‘try and develop new technologies’ for this completely…unprecedented situation [induced by COVID-19].

“We still have, um…I'm forgetting the word…What is that…the actors who put on, like, the suits with the balls on them…”

“Oh, that mocap stuff?” Posner offered.

Banta nodded.

“The motion capture people. Our IT folks, who needed to help get everything up and running, so folks could work from home—right?—there were still critical folks who had to go into an office.”

“Now, my new ‘ask’ was…We need to build something fast to be able to, yeah, legally and safely, get folks back into the office and say, ‘Hey, you know, are you healthy? Are you in a position where you can go into an office?’ You know, ‘Check this box on Slack.’ Interact with this Slack bot, and be able to get folks safely back. So, we had to come up with something brand new, day 12 into my job.”

It was a “brand new job, new city, new company,” said Banta.

Nothing like being thrown right into the line of fire!

“That was definitely…I look back on that time fondly, in the sense that that was the definition of problem solving for a brand-new problem that we’ve never done before. Obviously, it was tragic and horrible, for everything. But from a career perspective it was fascinating, just all the new problems that we had to solve.”

Posner shook his head.

“You must have just learned so many different skills through that experience…”

“We had Slack, we had G Suite [now Google Workspace], we had ServiceNow, we had Miro,” recalled Banta. “These were the things that were at our disposal.”

“It was, hey, ‘These are your building blocks. We need to come up with something now,’ right?”

“We have,” Banta clarified, “50 different locations at the time across the planet, right? What's considered legal in Australia is different than what's legal in Cologne, right? It was just wild…I'm one person, and I have to think about all these different repercussions across the entire planet.”

Posner fast forwarded to 2022.

Branta “moved to build and release,” that year, he pointed out. “I assume build and release is a branch of live ops, but are the two fields related?”

“That Venn diagram definitely has a lot of overlap,” she nodded. “Every game kind of handles their separations differently but, for us, our developer support team, build and release, and operations are kind of all tied together for…live services support.”

“I had worked in IT for about two and a half years,” Banta recalled. “I wanted to get closer to the action, if you will. It was cool in IT, that I got to interact with every studio in all these locations.”

“I had worked closely with Respawn,” she continued. “I was a part of, like, different acquisitions, and getting their technology ingrained...”

“EA does a great job of helping folks internally, if they want to move and gain new experiences. And I just was able to utilize what was offered by EA.”

“I saw,” she told Posner, and internal posting for “release manager, for build and release for Apex.”

“I actually did a talk about this, internally, for one of our resource groups. But I call it ‘connecting your dots’ because, yeah, I hadn't done live ops before.”

“I had not formally been a manager before. But I had all these other experiences. Leading compliance teams at USAA. Managing unprecedented situations, the problem solving, the mass amount of collaboration I've had to do in my previous roles.”

I was able to tie that to what Apex was looking for, for build and release,” said Banta. “I call it ‘connecting your dots’ because it's taking your experiences and tying it to exactly what's being asked for, because no one's going to make those correlations for you.”

“I work with an amazing team who's, basically, exactly the same from when I joined two and a half years ago. We have one of the most tenured teams within Respawn, which is amazing…I'm so glad I did it.”

Design Desk is glad you did too! Come back next week for the concluding half of our Player Driven rewind with Respawn’s engineering and financial Swiss Army knife, Julie Banta.