Fall Guys makes huge launch splash - and there's a first patch on the way

By Eric Abent/

At this point, it seems safe to say that Fall Guys is something of a phenomenon. After a closed beta period where the game drew in a large audience on Twitch, Fall Guys launched yesterday to immediate success – or at least enough success to cripple the multiplayer servers. Today, we're learning just how popular Fall Guys is.

Over on Twitter, developer Mediatonic says that Fall Guys pulled in more than 1.5 million players in its first 24 hours. Any game and developer, regardless of scale, would love to see those numbers on day one, but for a new IP like Fall Guys, it's huge.

There are a lot of things working in Fall Guys' favor here: not only has it taken off on Twitch (at the time of this writing, it has 261,000 viewers, which is enough to make it the most-viewed game on Twitch), but it's also free on PlayStation 4 through PlayStation Plus. Even on PC, it only costs $20, which puts in impulse buy territory for a lot of people.

So, it's really no surprise that Fall Guys was having some issues with server stability yesterday. At one point, Mediatonic had to take the multiplayer serves offline to add additional capacity. In today's tweet, Mediatonic said that it's working on a new patch for the game and that it's listening to feedback from players. Hopefully that patch will help with multiplayer stability further, but for now, we're not really sure what the update will entail.

It'll be interesting to see if Fall Guys' can maintain this popularity. It isn't every day we see a game successfully shake up the battle royale formula in ways that Fall Guys does, so if Mediatonic can consistently support it with fresh content, it could prove to be an enduring success. We shall see what happens from here, but for now Fall Guys is off to a solid start.

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