To call Babylon’s Fall a ‘flop’ seems comically inaccurate. After not managing to reach even 1,000 players on Steam on launch day, the game has continued to plummet despite attempts by Square Enix to pinpoint the title’s problems to fix them. Why was the game so offputting? Why did no one want to invest in it? The answers are simple in hindsight, but FromSoftware will be picking up the pieces of this wreck for a long time to come. In the most recent piece of damning news, Babylon’s Fall only managed to hit 8 consecutive players on Steam on the evening of April 12.
You read that right. Eight people were playing the game at one time. Sure, it was a weeknight, but there’s really no excuse for such a low player count–especially given that this is no indie game.
Babylon’s Fall has averaged around 138 concurrent players since it was released last month, though it regularly falls into the double digits. Nier Automata, another PlatinumGames work released over five years ago, has maintained an average player count of 1,464 over the past month.
Problems with the game are found at almost every level. Players have complained about its lack of difficulty, its monotonous level design, its strange oil painting-like graphics, and its reliance on microtransactions. Despite the game costing $60 on Steam, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with them, with one Steam user remarking that it would cost well over $100 to jump to Babylon Fall‘s endgame content.
Babylon’s Fall was released on March 3, 2022 for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. On release day, the game only managed to attract 650 concurrent players on Steam. Last month, Square Enix asked players to give detailed feedback in a lengthy survey, hoping that the title could be improved. Sadly, even if some of that feedback turns out to be useful, it’s hard to imagine a game with eight players seeing a noticeable comeback.
