The Fall of Fall Guys: The Rise and Decline

Introduction:

"How has Fall Guys lost 97% of its popularity? Looking back at 2020, among the games that would come to mind, surely one of them is Fall Guys, and it had a wild roller coaster journey. Upon release, its developer could not believe how successful the game had become. Yet, within only two months, it had become dead. It had a revival in 2022, but as of today, the game has lost 97% of its former popularity. Let's learn the complete story of Fall Guys in today's blog."

Background and Development:

"This game is developed by Mediatonic, a game development studio based in Britain that has been running since 2005. To begin with, they designed flash games for clients, and eventually, as they saw success, their team also grew. They opened other studios and started producing games of their own. Mediatonic had an employee strength of 230 and was a part of the Tonic Games Group, the parent company of Mediatonic and other studios. Fall Guys was conceived when lead game designer Joe Walsh thought of creating a 100-player Battle Royale inspired by Takashi's Castle. As you are surely familiar, Takashi's Castle is the massively popular Japanese game show that used to appear on TV, and we all enjoyed it immensely. The game was to be named the Fool's Gauntlet and was supposed to be exceedingly difficult to play, as you got eliminated if your character died, and not every match necessarily had a winner, just like Takashi's Castle. 

The idea appealed to creative designer Jeff Tanton, who took it up with Mediatonic's founders. Later, they thought of another title for it, Stumble Chums. Different obstacle courses were being designed for the game, but when concept artist Dan Huang created characters as beans, the team came to realize that not only level design, but they needed to focus on the characters as well. So, it was finally renamed Fall Guys, after the players who would fall and tumble to their own merrily but never gave up. A pitch deck was prepared, and the game was pitched to ten publishers and the Game Developers Conference in 2018. Finally, Devolver Digital agreed to publish the game. Six months later, work began on it with only 30 members."

Release and Success:

"As such, progress was a bit slow, but caught up later. The effort was to stack chaos against skill evenly throughout the minigames, such that skill would only get players so far ahead, and much was left to chance and confusion. Random rounds and different game modes would appear in a match to keep up interest. They agreed upon a clause that all game modes must be comprehensible in only three words. If any required more than three to describe it, they would not include it. Nothing more complex would go in. 

Several changes were going ahead, such as 60 players instead of 100 in a match, since the developers realized 60 players were enough to get the right chaotic gameplay. They got inspired by another game show called It's a Knockout that had contestants trying to perform tasks while wearing large bodysuits. Taking a cue from it, the developers used the ragdoll physics concept to build a character so that they keep stumbling upon each other and cannot execute proper motion or perform neat actions, and it would make the game all the more fun. The character beans were designed to look like vinyl toys. With the E3 Expo in 2019, Fall Guy: Ultimate Knockout was announced, and since then, it has gained height."

Initial Success and Decline:

"Upon release in August 2020 for PC and PS4, it saw 1.5 million players within 24 hours of launch. The developers had not anticipated this, and as such, their servers were overloaded with network traffic. They had estimated that it would take the game 6 months to a year to break even, but Fall Guys went and did it in only four hours. In its first week, the developers could not believe that so many people had already taken to the game. On August 10th, they learned the game had sold 2 million units. By August 26th, sales had reached 7 million units, and by November, it had recorded 10 million sales on the platform Steam. It would even become the most downloaded game on PS Plus. The game fetched its developer $185 million, which implied it was the biggest launch on Steam since Overwatch. It was truly a phenomenon in the making, and by December, 11 million copies of the game had been sold for PC alone. But what was the secret to such success? After all, there were a few factors at play."

Factors Contributing to Success:

"The first reason was perfect timing. I mean, it was during COVID that people were forced to idle at home, and they could spend hours on games or social media. Moreover, other summer holidays meant young gamers had all the time to themselves. Then, the game was included among the free ones on PS Plus, which was indeed a game changer. For one thing, PS Plus already had millions of subscribers around the world, and they received the game on PS4 at no cost. Admittedly, influencers played a significant role in popularizing the game. Upon discovery, they began streaming the game for hours on end. The game was entertaining in itself, and content creators would render it more amusing. As a result, gameplay videos received massive viewership. Even a week before release, when the game was restricted to beta testing, it had become the most watched game on Twitch."

Predictions and Decline:

"Even with the game doing well and making good sales, content creators on the web had begun foreseeing its downfall. For instance, Shroud had remarked early in August that Fall Guys was going to die out real quick, while VicStar commented that the excitement of the game dies down in a week and can no longer sustain any interest. Music said that it was good that Fall Guys came along and he found a break for a few weeks, but it won't make the big leagues. So, it was like a great break for a few weeks, but yeah, I don't think it was ever going to become the next big game. And all these predictions were coming true. Within a few weeks, viewership had declined, and as seen on Google Trends, the game had lost 90% of its popularity by October."

Recent Developments and Challenges:

"Updates were persistently far apart, causing gameplay to become repetitive. Also, players were somewhat upset and took to Twitter using #SaveFallGuys, which began trending on October 11, 2022. This was to draw Mediatonic's attention to the fact that the game incurred a lot of issues, such as bugs, subpar events, a lack of variety between rounds, incongruous matchmaking, and odd prices at the in-game shop. So, on November 15th, the developers announced that they would be pulling off a few rounds to keep the game stable. They termed this process vaulting, wherein some levels would make an appearance at times and disappear during others. Fans did not like it, to say the least, since it did not solve any of their problems but affected replayability. This led to #UnvaultFallGuys trending on January 20, 2023."

Future Prospects:

"So, Fall Guys had risen to success twice, only to fall again. Only time will tell when it might soar again. As of now, its seasons are kept running for two to three months to allow developers sufficient time to come up with new content. On March 10, 2023, Fall Guy's creative came out, wherein players could design their levels and share them using the in-game level editor. Will they be able to restore the game to its former glory, or true to its name, will it only fall into decline? That remains to be seen."

References to Other Blog:

"To learn about the downfall of Among Us, Click on it. If you enjoyed this Blog, add a Comment. See you in the next Blog, till then, Goodbye!