Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been having a pretty stellar 2020, but things can’t go on forever. With the recent launch of new cosmetics through new events and maps, as a big part of the push for Fall Guys Season 2, the game has seen a minor return. But still. players have been flocking to other games by the millions.
What’s the problem?
From the peak of the game back around the 160,000+ peak concurrent players back in August, the game has been losing players at a fast rate. The game has fallen steadily over the months. The September player numbers were already down to around 40,000 players at peak. That’s a huge 75% drop in players, and it’s not something to overcome.
The new high was even worse, with another 50% drop to a peak of 20,000 users. That peak quickly fell off after the launch of Season 2, with the game dipping even lower at peak just days later. And now we’re in even worse off shape. Numbers in December 2020 were much harsher for the future. As there are
The numbers got much better on December 15, with a jump to 28,000 with the release of Season 3. That didn’t last long either, as the numbers are back down below the 20,000 mark.
All that leaves to a single question: is Fall Guys Dead? It’s helpful to lay down some concepts to understand what’s happening. Fall Guys initially released back on August 4, 2020, on PlayStation 4 and PC via Windows. The game hit a massive peak of 200,000 users on Steam, and also became one of the most popular games on Twitch and YouTube. That’s no longer the case, not by a long shot. That turnaround is even worse these last couple of months.
The biggest problem for the game has been that the audience is very fickle. 2020 has shown that gaming has grown in popularity, but viral games don’t have resilience in this climate without tons of new content. Any game that finds explosive popularity needs to continually add new stuff to keep folks coming back for more than a few weeks. That hasn’t apparently happened to a sufficient degree with this game. The overall trends in gaming are incredibly volatile and hard to predict. And gamers are very quick to abandon a game. That leads to even more problems. So it remains to be seen if the game can make a comeback.
Fall Guys is a fun game, but it needs a ton more varied content. Sure there have been plenty of cosmetics added, but most people don’t care about that at all. The real thing people need is more maps and new mechanics. The hyper-competitive nature of some players means that they will ruin the game for many players. I know I hate it when players bust out notes and hyper-specific details and basically completely eliminate the social deduction element of the game. I’ve quit out of several games when players do this, and I can’t be the only one. This means that when players memorize the maps, a lot of the replayability for them goes away.
Another big problem for the game aside from the lack of content was cheaters. The devs did a great job alleviating the cheater problem once they did pay attention. Hackers were a persistent issue with the game for weeks after launch. During Season 2 though, the team put in much tighter controls and banned many problematic accounts.
Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is available on PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam. The game is also coming to iOS and Android in China. That may help a bit, but things are still going to be a rather uphill battle.
