Fall Guys developer Mediatonic is “suffering from success,” but still plans to expand the game with a ton of new content.
Fall Guys is a wild success story. Two million copies sold in the first week on Steam, one million followers on Twitter, and an entire social media platform completely abuzz with talk about the game. By all measures, Fall Guys is a sensation.
“Our highest estimates have been absolutely obliterated by the actual response," said Fall Guys lead designer Joe Walsh in an interview with Kotaku Australia. “You can’t plan those things. You can’t predict it. Sometimes, it’s just right place, right time.”
Walsh explained to Kotaku that wild success comes at a price, and in the case of Fall Guys it was insane technical issues brought on by two million players all cramming themselves into what was expected to be a small indie release. Server outages, hackers, and random drops from game searches were common for the first week of release, although they’ve mostly been fixed with ongoing updates.
Another side of Fall Guys’ success has been its social media presence, which has been largely orchestrated by community manager Oliver Hindle. Going from quaint one-on-one interactions to speaking with over a million fans has been quite the switch, which Hindle describes in the same way he would on Twitter: a meme.
“A wise man once said ‘Suffering from Success’, which is what I’m feeling right now,” Hindle said. “Actually, it wasn’t a wise man, it was DJ Khaled.”
Fall Guys is still hosting an ongoing charity auction where anyone can bid to have their costume design added to the game, and retweets from fan creations (such as this rock cover of the Fall Guys OST) abound.
As for the future, Walsh said that the plan is to keep adding new content to Fall Guys. “Game shows are built on variety and they’re built on novelty so for Fall Guys to achieve its goal of being the ‘greatest game show ever made’ we need to create that sort of variety and that sort of novelty.”
Crossplay, playlists, and “squad mode” are all being looked at for the future, but the current goal is for everyone to experience something new whenever they play.
Switch owners will also have a wait a little longer for Fall Guys to arrive on Nintendo’s platform. Read the full interview on Kotaku to find out why.
Source: Kotaku Australia
