fall guys issues – Trekking with Dennis

This article was originally going to be titled “Can Season 4 reinvigorate Fall Guys” – but that was before the announcement that Epic Games had bought developer Mediatonic! However, many of the points I planned to make still apply in some form, and in addition we have the buyout and its associated effects to consider. So settle in as we talk about the hit party game of the summer – last summer, that is – Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout!

A few days ago I put Fall Guys on my list of games that deserve a second look in Spring 2021, and despite some of the criticisms I have of the game, I stand by that. Fall Guys is plenty of fun, and the addition of new rounds and changes to existing rounds has extended the game’s longevity. I recently got back into playing after taking a break over the holidays, and I’ve been having fun with it all over again. There is a lot to love about Fall Guys, but there’s also no denying that right now, the game’s survival hangs in the balance.

Is *Fall Guys* going to survive, or did Epic Games waste their money?

This is nothing to do with the Epic Games acquisition. Fall Guys was struggling long before that was announced, and my original plan for writing this article was to look at the possibility of Season 4 bringing players back. That’s something Fall Guys needs to address urgently. They have a good social media team, being active on Twitter and elsewhere every day, churning out memes and one-liners of the sort that a modern social media manager for an online game should. But it doesn’t seem to be having much effect.

Fall Guys blew up when it was launched last August, but almost as quickly as it arrived on the gaming scene, most of its players abandoned it. On Steam, Fall Guys peaked at around 125,000 concurrent players in August last year, and sold over 2,000,000 copies within a few weeks of launch. But as of yesterday, when I checked its progress on Steam, it had fallen to fewer than 6,000 concurrent players, with a maximum for the day of fewer than 10,000, and was barely clinging on to the top 100 most-played games on the platform, occupying the 100th slot.

*Fall Guys* was the 100th-most played game on Steam at time of writing.

To put that into context, Fall Guys had fewer players than titles like Civilization V, The Sims 4, Skyrim, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and even a title I’d never heard of called Geometry Dash, which is a port of a mobile game that originally launched in 2013. Ouch.

As a player, this has become noticeable. Though most games I play are usually fully-populated (with 55-60 out of a maximum of 60 players) it can take several minutes of waiting just to begin a game, with long loading times in the queue as the game struggles to assemble enough players. With no cross-platform play between PC and PlayStation, this is obviously beginning to become an issue. One of the highlights of Fall Guys – something I praised it for back in August – is that because rounds are so short, losing or failing to qualify doesn’t feel so bad. All you had to do was jump immediately into the next one! But if you have to wait several minutes at a time to even just begin a game, one of the absolutely vital components of Fall Guys is lost, making it significantly less enjoyable. Not only are the waits themselves frustrating, but losing at a round risks becoming frustrating too – because you know if you don’t qualify it’ll take a while to start a new game.

So what caused Fall Guys to lose much of its playerbase? That’s the key point, because addressing it – if indeed that’s even possible – is the key challenge facing Mediatonic and Epic Games.

As much as I hate to say this about a game I’ve come to greatly enjoy, the fundamental problem is that Fall Guys was a “release now, fix later” title. I’ve talked at length here on the website about the live service business model, and how the ubiquity of internet connections has led developers and publishers to push out games that weren’t quite ready with a view to improving them later. It almost never works, and Fall Guys, as much as I love the cute little title, is an example of that phenomenon too.

Firstly, Fall Guys launched with no anti-cheat software. I know that it’s scummy and pretty disgusting for a basement-dwelling low-life to cheat at a fun little game like this, but realistically, developers Mediatonic and original publisher Devolver Digital should have anticipated it. Cheating happens in any online game, and if you give players even the tiniest opportunity, some will cheat. Playing Fall Guys before the addition of anti-cheat was not fun, because what was the point in progressing through the rounds only to lose in the finale to an invincible cheater or a cheater who can simply fly above the course?

Cheating was a problem in *Fall Guys* on PC for a while.

The cheating problem pushed players away, just as I said it would when I discussed Fall Guys’ impending Season 2 update back in September. When I’ve spoken to people about the game or seen comments on social media, aside from the “dead game” memes the one thing that seems to come up most often is that people remember how Fall Guys had a cheating problem. Folks don’t know that’s been solved because most didn’t stick around, preferring to move on to games that weren’t plagued by cheating. The game should never have been released without anti-cheat software, and that’s perhaps its biggest mistake.

The rise of Among Us stole Fall Guys’ thunder in some ways, even though the two titles aren’t really comparable from a gameplay perspective. But there is a vague aesthetic similarity between the crewmates in Among Us and the jelly beans in Fall Guys, so it’s worth considering why Among Us is doing so well while Fall Guys appears to be in decline.

Among Us is one quarter the price of Fall Guys, at least on PC. On mobile or tablet, the game is free. Among Us is available everywhere, compared to Fall Guys which is currently only on PlayStation 4/5 and PC. Among Us has never had a cheating problem.

*Among Us* came from nowhere to overtake *Fall Guys*.

Both games had the potential to break into the mainstream and become ongoing successes, but only Among Us really has. The biggest factor in its favour is its ubiquity, particularly its availability on mobile devices and tablets, which are the platform of choice for many younger players. This enabled the game – which was originally released in 2018 – to become so popular. The fact that it’s free-to-play helps immensely too; younger gamers in particular are always on the lookout for free titles, which goes a long way to explaining the success of Epic Games’ mainstay: Fortnite.

When considering Fall Guys’ release, one huge factor preventing it growing was the natural ceiling on its playerbase caused by not being available on every platform. There was no Xbox or Switch release, and while those platforms are now scheduled for this summer, that’s a year too late. Without knowing more about the technical side of the game I can’t say for sure whether it would be possible to port it to mobile devices, but if that were possible then obviously that would open up the game still further.

*Fall Guys* is finally coming to Switch – but not till the summer.

Nintendo Switch is the platform I would have chosen to prioritise if I were in charge of Fall Guys’ development and release. PlayStation 4 has a larger install base, but Switch players are, I would suggest, more interested in this kind of fun pick-up-and-play party game on the whole. With over 60 million Nintendo Switch consoles having been sold, that’s a massive potential playerbase that Fall Guys missed at launch – and will continue to miss until this summer. By then it could be too late.

An online game that barely breaks 10,000 concurrent players is not doing well, and while that doesn’t account for PlayStation 4 players, it’s hard to imagine the game is doing significantly better on its only other platform. There are still people interested in Fall Guys, and there are still new players jumping on board, but the big challenge facing Epic Games and Mediatonic as they begin their partnership is shoring up the playerbase and bringing in as many new players as possible. Fall Guys was a hit last summer. Whether it can be a hit again is up to its new owners.

Season 4 is coming soon, promising new rounds and new cosmetics with a futuristic theme.

So what needs to happen to bring players back? The launch of Season 4, with new cosmetics and new rounds will be a good start. But there needs to be more of that, with the game basically being continuously updated. New rounds and new round variants are good, but there could also be timed events, such as the recent double-kudos offer, competitions focusing on one aspect of the game (like a fixed set of rounds, for example) and other such things that will incentivise players to keep coming back.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the polar opposite of Fall Guys in so many ways, but one thing New Horizons gets absolutely spot-on is the incentives it offers players to log in at least once per day. Fall Guys needs to find some kind of hook, some way to keep its players checking in often. Once they’ve sorted that – which is no small task – bringing in new players is priority #2.

Ski Fall, another of the rounds in the game.

Releasing the game on Switch and Xbox is a good start, but I’d love to see mobile devices too if at all possible. Then there absolutely needs to be cross-platform play. If Sony remains intransigent about this – as they often are – then cross-play could be between Xbox, Switch, and PC only. But it has to be in there somehow, because splitting up the already small playerbase into walled gardens by platform makes those wait times mentioned above more noticeable. If PC players could join PlayStation 4 players right now, today, I bet those wait times would be cut at least in half. And that in itself would make the experience more enjoyable, keeping existing players around for longer.

One thing that Mediatonic teased in their announcement of their deal with Epic Games was a possible free-to-play model. To me, this is a double-edged sword for a game like Fall Guys. While it would undoubtedly bring in more players, it would mean the game would have to find an alternative way of making money, and in the games industry that only means one thing: microtransactions.

*Fortnite* is a free-to-play game that makes all its money via microtransactions.

Fall Guys has always offered the ability to buy in-game currency, yet it’s never felt intrusive or obligatory. The game is very generous with in-game rewards and items earned through basic gameplay, and I would hate to see that disappear or for cosmetics to be locked behind a paywall in future. Part of the fun of Fall Guys has been earning cosmetic items through gameplay, or earning in-game currency through gameplay and trading that for cool items in the in-game store. Going free-to-play would mean all of that would change, and while it would unquestionably attract more players, I’m not sure the change would be a good one.

With all of the controversy that lootboxes and randomised rewards generate these days, I would hope that even Epic Games wouldn’t try to force them into Fall Guys, but that remains a risk. From a PC player’s perspective, I’m also concerned that Fall Guys may eventually be withdrawn from Steam – Epic Games has its own store and PC client, after all, so why would they leave Fall Guys on their competitor’s platform? This may seem extreme, but it’s exactly what happened to Rocket League. That game used to be available on Steam, but following an acquisition by Epic Games it was withdrawn. The game technically still exists on Steam for players who already owned it prior to its withdrawal, but an Epic Games account is required to play, and new players can’t add it to their Steam libraries. While Mediatonic promised in their statement that this isn’t part of the plan for Fall Guys, it’s hard to see that being sustainable if the game survives into the longer term. Sooner or later, Epic Games is going to want to monopolise its purchase, just as they do with other games that they own.

Time will tell if this was a good idea for Epic, *Fall Guys*, and the players.

Removing Fall Guys from Steam would run counter to everything we’ve discussed about trying to retain players and expand the playerbase, so the game may be safe in the short term. But watch this space, because it feels inevitable that Fall Guys’ presence on Steam is doomed!

So to answer my original question: can Epic Games reinvigorate Fall Guys? The short answer is “maybe.” The game is a huge amount of fun, and bringing it to the Switch in particular feels like a natural fit, one which should bring in new players who are well-suited to enjoy this kind of cute, fun little title. But the game’s longer-term prospects are murky at best, and I’m surprised that a company like Epic Games would take a risk on a game which appears to be in a serious decline. Hopefully their involvement can stop the rot and turn things around. Fall Guys is such a fun game that it deserves to last longer than a few measly months.

Fall Guys is available now on PC and PlayStation 4/5, with launches on Xbox and Nintendo Switch planned for this summer. Fall Guys is the copyright of Mediatonic, Devolver Digital, and Epic Games. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

I was a little surprised to hear that Season 2 of Fall Guys – a game that only launched at the beginning of August – would be arriving in early October. That seems an awfully short span of time for a “season”, though admittedly Fall Guys has hardly been a game that follows the beaten path. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of seasons in online games, it’s something that popular titles like Fortnite have been doing for several years. In short, each season brings new content and new opportunities to progress. In Fall Guys’ case, this means new mini-games and new cosmetics.

But Fall Guys has some issues, and I’d much rather see time and attention spent on improving the core experience before adding new content.

And I know: it isn’t just an either/or case. But at least some of the development time dedicated to building new content for the game – if indeed it is new and wasn’t cut from the initial release – could be reallocated to fixing some of the problems Fall Guys has. Most egregiously I’m thinking of cheating.

There are countless videos on YouTube advertising hacks and cheats for *Fall Guys*. In this example, a player is able to fly above the course far faster than the players below can run.

I know, right? What kind of pathetic basement-dwelling low-life needs to cheat in a fun little game like Fall Guys? It’s sad, really. But unfortunately, at least on the PC version where I play, it’s becoming much more common. When I first played the game in early August, I didn’t encounter a single cheater. And for the first couple of weeks or so that continued to be the case; the thought never occurred to me that cheating would even exist in a game like this. But in the last couple of weeks cheating has become commonplace. I would guess that roughly one in five games I play now has at least one cheater; some have several.

I don’t pretend to understand the technical side of how the cheats and exploits work, but in-game they appear to give characters the ability to move very fast, fly, and even clip through obstacles and scenery. This gives cheaters a massive advantage, and I’ve played some racing rounds where one or two cheaters were able to qualify before everyone else had even got past the first quarter of the course. This has been going on for some time, and it clearly hasn’t been fixed or patched out yet, but it should be a priority.

When an online game becomes plagued by cheaters, it becomes offputting for everyone else. What’s the point in continuing to progress through the rounds to make it to a finale when you know you’re going to lose to a cheater who can fly all the way to the top of the mountain before you’re even a quarter of the way there? Or who can levitate over the course while everyone else has to hop from tile to tile? There’s no fun in that! And it’s going to result in people no longer wanting to play.

There are other issues too, most notably lopsided teams in some of the team games. I made note of this when I put the rounds in a ranked list, but some of the team games can be horribly uneven. Even a single extra player can provide teams with a huge advantage in some cases, and while the patch notes for a recent update claimed to have fixed the problem, I’ve continued to see unbalanced teams often.

It can be frustrating to play a heavily one-sided team game.

Some rounds need tweaking too, at least from my experience. Perfect Match – a game that involves memorising tiles to avoid falling – routinely ends with hardly anyone being eliminated, and despite the fact that it’s a very enjoyable round, surely something’s got to change there. Likewise Roll Out, which is another round I have a lot of fun with, can take forever as it just isn’t that difficult, meaning it takes a long time to eliminate the right number of players. Better to fix the current rounds than work on a bunch of new ones, right?

Though the server situation has improved massively since the game’s launch, there are still disconnects and failures to connect to contend with. It can be very disheartening to make it all the way to the finale only to get disconnected from the server!

I don’t want to just attack Fall Guys. This is developer Mediatonic’s first big hit, and I genuinely want the game to continue to be the roaring success that it has been this month. According to sales reports, the PC version alone has sold over seven million copies! That’s an astonishing accomplishment for any game, let alone one developed by a small studio. It would be such a shame to see that hard work undone if players are driven away by cheating and other unfixed issues.

Preparing a big update – or “season” – as we head into the autumn does make sense for a business perspective, and I understand that Mediatonic and publisher Devolver Digital recognise they’ve got a hit on their hands and want to keep players engaged. But I’d caution them by saying this: new content will only achieve that objective if players believe that games are fair and that the rules apply to everyone. If cheating continues to run rampant, and cheaters continue to get away scot-free, it won’t matter how much new content is available because there’ll be no one coming back to play it.

Staying ahead of the curve when it comes to stamping out cheating and exploits is part of the job for any company that wants its multiplayer title to be a success. The moment an exploit or cheat is identified it needs to be patched out; Fall Guys has only released a couple of patches since launch, and by now they must know how players are able to exploit the game to fly, move quickly, clip, etc. Quicker fixes for cheats is a must – and any player found cheating needs to be permanently banned from the game.

New cosmetic items are great and all, but preventing cheating would be better.

The most successful online games take a tough stance on cheating. It’s a shame that it exists, that there are people so scummy as to cheat in a game like this. But not understanding it or taking a dim view won’t make it go away, and with the PC version of the game not even using player’s gamertags/Steam names, identifying cheaters to report them to the developer is even more difficult for regular players. Mediatonic and Devolver Digital need to step up – they’ve got a hit on their hands, but they’re in danger of losing it.

Focusing on bringing out new content while these issues still exist feels wrong. Players who’ve had their fun ruined by cheaters are well within their rights to ask why the growing problem doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it warrants, and while it’s absolutely fair to say that a developer can do two things at once, the messaging and marketing trying to hype up Season 2 is in danger of becoming a bit of an own goal from a PR perspective.

Here’s hoping that cheating can be stamped out, and other issues tackled, so we can all get hyped up for Season 2 and the new content it will bring. I’m looking forward to it – but I’m also increasingly worried about some of these issues.

Fall Guys is out now on PC and PlayStation 4. Fall Guys is the copyright of Mediatonic and Devolver Digital. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Tag: fall guys issues

Can Epic Games reinvigorate Fall Guys?

Perhaps Fall Guys could fix some of its issues before releasing Season 2?