Fall Guys, Mediatonic’s Takeshi’s Castle inspired online obstacle course, had a wildly successful launch yesterday, even overtaking Just Chatting on Twitch. The cute and cuddly game had to take itself offline on launch day to fix some server issues, but even that could not derail the hype train.
The rough and tumble platform Battle Royale has been hotly anticipated since it was revealed in June 2019, and has been a smash success since last week’s beta. With its full launch though, the game was propelled into another stratosphere, proving to be exceptionally popular on Steam and Twitch alike.
It averaged over a quarter of a million unique viewers on Twitch, clocking in at 274,153, with Just Chatting just behind at 251,478. Familiar faces Grand Theft Auto V, League Of Legends, Fortnite, and Call of Duty round out the top 6, but even third placed GTA V was some 60,000 short of Just Chatting’s average. Who knows how long Fall Guys’ time in the spotlight will be, but for now, it’s certainly making the most of it.
With the combination of beta virality, the gap in the market Fall Guys plugs and the fact it was free to PlayStation+ subscribers, many were expecting a very good launch for the game, but few could have predicted the monumental numbers the indie game pulled in. Few, it seems, including the developers themselves, who reported that the game had “skyrocketed right past our absolute highest number of expected players for the entire day,” and needed to switch the servers off the get them to “MAXIMUM BEEF”.
🚨 We're going to switch off matchmaking for 30 mins so that we can BEEF the servers up to MAXIMUM BEEF
We've basically skyrocketed right past our 'absolute highest number of expected players for the entire day' 😅
We just need 30 mins to brace ourselves and we should be 😙👌
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) August 4, 2020
As well as this 30 minute server shut off, the game went down for a further two hours later on, still scrambling to keep up with the unprecedented demand. During these two hours, a whopping 146,524 players still attempted to get online, with a secret internal server test crashing because it was immediately flooded by people attempting to play.
Unfortunately, the official Twitter also reported that the game was being review bombed on Steam as a result of server outages, although as of right now, it holds an 87% Positive on Steam and over 4.5 stars on PlayStation, both of which are indicative of its runaway success.
We're currently being review-bombed on Steam… ☹️
We're working really hard to get running smoothly for SO MANY players!
We know it's super frustrating, but if you could hold off from negatively reviewing – Until you get chance to play the game, it would really help us out ♥️
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) August 4, 2020
Fall Guys capitalises on the incredibly popular Battle Royale genre but approaches it from a fresh, colourful, non-violent perspective. After setting Twitch alight on launch day, could it be a new big player on the streaming scene?