Following the abysmal performance of Babylon’s Fall, the CEO of PlatinumGames has finally come forward to discuss what went wrong and what the future holds for the company’s live service game strategy.
Babylon’s Fall was first released in February 2022 and was an instant flop. Impressive in the worst way, the game only saw a concurrent player count of 650 on Steam during the week of its release, with that number dropping to less than 10 players in April. Despite this, PlatinumGames promised that more content was coming. In early September, this promise was broken as the company announced that the game would be ending service in September 2023. Babylon’s Fall is no longer available to purchase. Following this announcement, many gamers took to social media to show that GameStop was simply giving the game away for free.
Atsushi Inaba, the CEO of PlatinumGames, sat down with VGC to speak about the struggling title, seeming incredibly apologetic for the poor player experience that the hack-and-slash title provided during its short lifespan.
“Any disappointment that we might have caused for our fan base is something we feel extremely sorry about, the fact that we led our dedicated fans to feel that way as a developer,” Inaba said. “Providing any sentiment other than enjoyment and fun in our creations to players is something that we’re not very happy about at all as a developer.”
No aspect of the game escaped criticism upon release. Players 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 a standard $60 on Steam, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with additional charges, with one Steam user remarking that it would cost well over $100 to skip to Babylon Fall‘s endgame content.
Despite the abject failure of Babylon’s Fall, Inaba stressed that PlatinumGames will still focus on live service titles going forward. Understandably, he noted that splitting the workload with an external company isn’t something he wants to do again.
“There’s a lot that we learned from this experience, and it’s not changed our future plans or outlook moving forward regarding doing live service games at all. There are two pillars, so to speak, that we can look at internally for our development teams, that being the people within the same company. The first is just the sheer fun of the core game mechanics that you have in the live service game and secondly, performing the live service itself.
I think these two pillars are values that need to be strongly connected internally, and need to be viewed, treasured, and valued by the same people, on the same team, at the very same company.”
While this was a major blow to the company, PlatinumGames will no doubt recover with the impending release of Bayonetta 3, scheduled to release for the Nintendo Switch on October 28.
