Fall Guys Servers Can’t Keep Up With Launch Day Popularity

Fall Guys Servers Can’t Keep Up With Launch Day Popularity

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout released today on PC and PlayStation 4 to much fanfare — perhaps too much. The hotly anticipated physics-based party platformer has been plagued by server issues all day.

Connection issues started shortly after 8:00 a.m. ET. According to the game’s official Twitter account, more than 120,000 players connected to the game at once, leading to “occasional interruptions” the developers predicted would last “for the next 30 minutes.”

But Fall Guys’ problems persisted far longer than expected. Around noon, the developers disabled account creation for PS4 players. At 4:30 p.m. ET, the developers decided to “switch off matchmaking while we scale up.”

As Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson reported last week, Fall Guys has had an unusual marketing campaign. Developer Mediatonic and publisher Devolver Digital handed out beta keys to streamers, both big and small, who in turn gave them away to viewers. This method catapulted Fall Guys straight to the top of the Twitch charts, cracking 200,000 concurrent views and becoming the top-streamed game on Twitch for the night (a feat that was almost repeated the following evening).

[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/an-unreleased-indie-game-took-over-twitch-but-it-didnt-come-out-of-nowhere/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/07/28/m36hya3mmdd94sdetepr-300×168.png” title=”An Unreleased Indie Game Took Over Twitch, But It Didn’t Come Out Of Nowhere” excerpt=”You might have had a good weekend — maybe played a video game and then moved to a different part of your home and played another game, because that’s quarantine, baby — but you probably didn’t have as good of a weekend as the developers of Fall Guys. The battle…”]

Fall Guys is also included in August’s games with PS Plus, which are “free” for those who pay the membership fee. PS Plus has a massive subscriber base of more than 40 million users, according to figures released earlier this summer, so that certainly brought in a ton of players.

I’ve been playing on PS4 intermittently throughout the day and have run into server issues the whole time. I’ve had a tough time getting into games and have been kicked from matches before they’ve ended. I’ve even lost games, ended up in the post-game screen, and been kicked out while trying to leave, missing out on my sweet, sweet in-game currency.

What I have managed to play of this pastel-coloured battle royale has been a total blast. Each match, which starts with up to 60 players, is broken up into five rounds of mini-games. At the end of each round, losing players are culled from the match, until just one player is left standing. This compulsive structure compels further play, so it’s not hard to see why players have flocked to this game in droves.

We’ll have more on Fall Guys in the coming days — once we can reliably play it.


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