Fall Guys Goes Free-To-Play, Servers Immediately Crash

Image: Mediatonic

Oops, they did it once more. Fall Guys, Mediatonic’s bubbly platformer royale, launched on Xbox and Switch yesterday as a part of an enormous free-to-play overhaul. The recreation’s servers instantly combusted, with studies of connectivity woes persevering with greater than 24 hours later.

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First launched for PlayStation and PC in August 2020, Fall Guys was one of many breakout video games of the lockdown-era pandemic. You have to recollect, life actually sucked again then (okay, in covid phrases, it nonetheless sucks). For a second, Fall Guys brightened up some darkish instances, its chaotic vibes and bite-sized 60-player minigames—to not point out a flip because the month-to-month “free” recreation from PS Plus, and a Twitch-based advertising marketing campaign—serving to propel it to large recognition.

In March 2021, Epic Games acquired Mediatonic outright. Part of that deal meant shifting Fall Guys off the Steam storefront and onto Epic’s proprietary recreation launcher. (Fall Guys is now not on the market on Steam.) But one other half meant pivoting the sport to a free-to-play mannequin, adopting an method much like Rocket League, whose developer, Psyonix, was scooped up by Epic in 2019.

That free-to-play rollout occurred yesterday, as a part of Fall Guys’s sixth season, aptly titled “Free For All.” Players instantly reported hassle truly enjoying. Like the social media feeds of the sport they tried (and failed) to play, lots of these studies took the type of memes.

At 10:02 a.m. ET, the official Fall Guys Twitter account acknowledged the woes, adopted by a second acknowledgement 50 minutes later. It then switched again to enterprise as ordinary, firing off tweets about cake, in-game cosmetics, and the unsettling undeniable fact that Fall Guys’ titular fall guys are six ft tall. The recreation’s official feed has not stated whether or not or not Mediatonic considers the problem resolved.

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Players positive don’t. On social media, some say they’ve to take a seat by way of lengthy waits to get right into a match, or must constantly reset to play. Others say they’ll’t get into video games in any respect. Mediatonic has not offered a timeline for a repair. It is, as with many on-line recreation launches, a multitude. The solely distinction between this and, say, Outriders is that Fall Guys has already been out for nearly two years.

When reached for remark, representatives for Mediatonic forwarded Kotaku to Epic. Representatives for Epic didn’t reply in time for publication. (Update, 3:15 p.m. ET: A Fall Guys spokesperson despatched over the next assertion: “The Free For All launch yesterday set multiple records for Fall Guys, including the highest number ever of concurrent and single-day players. This put high loads on our servers and affected some of our matchmaking systems periodically throughout the day, and we apologize to [everyone] who had to wait to jump into the game. Thankfully multiple fixes have already been implemented successfully to stabilize performance, and we’re glad to see so many people jumping into the game with friends across platforms.”)

This isn’t the one time Fall Guys has been hobbled by severe server failures. In 2020, Mediatonic constructed up a ton of pre-release buzz by granting early entry to Twitch streamers and their huge fan bases. When the sport launched, a reported 120,000 gamers tried to play directly. The servers sputtered. What’s that saying about time and flat circles?