How Could Fall Guys Continue Its Success after Selling More than 11 Million Copies on Steam?

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (hereinafter referred to as Fall Guys) is one of the biggest dark horses in the game industry in 2020. Today, five months after the game’s launch, the development team still feels incredible about its unprecedented success. Since its launch in early August last year, Fall Guys has sold more than 11 million copies on Steam. Although the developer Mediatonic has never disclosed the sales data of Fall Guys PS4, it has already become the most downloaded PlayStation Plus game in history.

“We expect that by our standards, Fall Guys could achieve a good market performance,” Dave Bailey, CEO and co-founder of M Agency, said, “but we can’t even imagine it selling so many copies.” 

Joe Walsh, chief designer of Fall Guys, added: “In the game industry, many people define their success by whether they could recover their R&D costs. I thought this recover may take 6 months or a year before the game is launched. However, Fall Guys achieved this goal in only about 4 hours.”

Several factors contributed to the success of Fall Guys: During the epidemic, the number of game players increased significantly; the launch coincided with the summer vacation, and young players had more leisure time; the game adopted popular themes, which can be understood by anyone who have watched task-challenging variety shows...

However, one of the key reasons for the rapid popularity of Fall Guys is that it joined the member-free-list of PlayStation Plus. Similar to Rocket League, Fall Guys reached tens of millions of PS Plus players around the world in a very short time. “We are pleased with the decision to add the game to PlayStation Plus.” Bailey said.

According to Bailey, M agency decided to make Fall Guys an online service-oriented game from the very beginning, but the speed of players’ consumption of game content surprised the development team. Another developer disclosed that after the launch of Fall Guys Season 2, many players completed 40 new levels in just a few days, even though these levels appeared in random order.

The Fall Guys team has adjusted the schedule for launching new content, and M Agency quickly started recruitment, with the goal of doubling its team size. However, this British studio is not in a hurry to expand. 

“You can’t expand the team overnight.” Walsh explained, “The player base of Fall Guys is indeed very large, but this does not mean that we can suddenly increase content production. We must be very careful not to over promise players, because new employees can’t start working on content as soon as they join the team. Some players seem to think that we can transfer all staff from other teams, but we can’t. In addition to Fall Guys, the studio needs to continue to support other projects.”

Recently, M Agency is developing the mid-season content for Fall Guys Season 3. “In fact, most content of Season 2 was planned before the game was launched. At that time, it’s hard to to predict how many players would play online simultaneously, or how players will react to the game.” Jeff Tanton, the creative director of M Agency said, “Although that update provided some good content, it didn’t respond to player feedback as explicitly as it did in Season 3.”

Today, responding to player feedback has become one of M Agency’s priorities. But Walsh admitted that it’s difficult for the development team to meet the needs of all players at the same time because Fall Guys attracted so many players. Some people asked the development team to add relatively hard-core content like data page, leader board, and competitive ranking mode, but M Agency hopes to maintain a low threshold, so that the game can always be attractive to mass users.

“We need to be open to the thoughts of experienced players, and at the same time, ensure a good experience for new players, because after a few rounds of game, they will decide whether to continue their playing.” Walsh explained, “Those players may not have heard of Fall Guys, or even have never played multiplayer games...We can’t blindly simulate the practices of other games, because many players of Fall Guys may never have played those games.”

M Agency hopes to promote the long-term success of Fall Guys --- In addition to designing new ways to play, this studio will also strive to improve the stability of the game. “Some players may not realize that the more content we add, the more complex the game would become. So compared to when the game was first launched, we need to put in more effort to achieve basic stability.”