SHREY NEMANI: Welcome back to the Game On podcast. This is the third episode of our video game podcast series, which is all about the game Fall Guys, specifically the fall of it.
Fall Guys is chaotic and thrilling. You have to navigate through an obstacle course and reach the end line. There are multiple rounds in one game. Every round, more people are eliminated until the final round. You have to qualify in every round by reaching the end line in order to make it to the final round. You then face off against the other qualifiers. You race to the end line, which is now a crown. The first player to the Crown wins the game and is the winner. The concept is simple but enthralling.
Fall Guys first came out in the August of 2020. However, the game started off pretty slow until 2022 in the first half of 2022 everyone who played video games played fall guys. In June of 2022, 10 million people played Fall Guys. In July of 2022, just under 18 million people played. The jump was crazy. For the next year and a half, there were just under 20 million people playing every month. The surge would only last so long though. The dip in popularity started in March of 2024 with only 13 million people playing every month.
There are a multitude of factors into why the game tanked.
Freshman Samuel Krueger shares why he stopped playing the game.
SAMUEL KRUEGER: I don’t know, it was just kind of boring. It’s because it’s just like, you kind of just play the same, like, little mini game over and over again. It just gets boring.
SHREY NEMANI: There are three big reasons as to why the game’s popularity dipped.
Number one was there were no new updates and designs. The game had a design that enticed many viewers, but people like change, they will get bored. There were only so many maps and it felt repetitive. It felt as though every other round you would get the same map. It was boring. The game didn’t have many long-term players because it simply wasn’t interesting enough. It wasn’t a new experience anymore. It didn’t have the same hype as it did when it came out. It was more of a game that you would hop on with your friends when you were really bored. It wasn’t anyone’s main game. Players wanted something else. When they didn’t get it, they decided to stop playing and find a new game.
Which leads us to our next point.
Number two, with games like Among Us and Fortnite starting to gain popularity again, Fall Guy’s participants went down. Fall Guys was being ousted by its competitors and couldn’t recover. Its competitors learned how to evolve and quickly flew over their obstacles and Fall Guys on the gaming leaderboard.
Games will get boring for everyone eventually, but it’s not about that. If a game can rebound with creative updates, people will not leave. Fortnite and Among Us are prime examples of games that climb their way up after being shot down, which is what separates them from a game like Fall Guys.
Number Three console server crashes. In the midst of its peak, fall guys started becoming unplayable. There were so many people playing that no one could play. That constant lagging left players more frustrated than ever. We just wanted to play the game we liked without any interruptions. And the game didn’t just crash for like, three days or something like that. The game was down for weeks on end, and when the cause of the crashes was supposedly resolved, a new issue would pop out of nowhere, leading to more outrage and confusion.
It is safe to say that people, including me, were fed up and would be happy with any game that didn’t have constant connectivity issues again, like Fortnite, or Among Us, really — any game at this point, we’re just tired of the lighting.
Overall. Fall Guys is an incredibly successful game; even after its downfall, millions of people still play the game. It might have fallen off as the most popular game, but it certainly is not a dead game. With an interesting update or two, some new designs, and no more crashes, this game could go back to its glory days, and I’m sure players would go back with even a bit of new hype. If someone told me to come play Fall Guys because there was a new update or a new team or a new theme, I would get on in an instant, because the concept of a game is great, and one new modification could bring the OG Fall Guys feel that we all know and love.
Thank you for tuning in to the Game On podcast. Make sure to come join us for the final episode, The Rise of Brawl Stars with our friend Jack Gao. To see more podcasts, subscribe to The Rubicon on Podbean or visit RubicOnline.