Fall Guys has 20 million players two days after switching to free-to-play

Fall Guys has 20 million players according to the makers. That number was achieved two days after the game made the transition to a free-to-play payment model. The game came out at the end of 2020 and was initially very popular, but then lost many players.

The Fall Guys account on Twitter mentions the number of 20 million players, but gives no further details. It is not known if these are new players or the total number since its release almost two years ago. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout released on August 4, 2020 on Steam and for PlayStation consoles. That same month, the PC version had sold 7 million units and was ‘the most downloaded PlayStation Plus game’. The game was free to download for PS Plus subscribers that month.

In the months following its initial release, multiplayer game Fall Guys was very popular. It had sold 10 million copies by the end of 2020. The popularity of the game declined after that and the number of players decreased. On Steam charts shows that there were 6,000 to 10,000 players active with the Steam version of the game in the last year. Shortly after release, that was about 170,000 daily players. Such statistics are not available for the PlayStation and Epic Games Store versions.

The game initially cost 20 euros, but has been free-to-play since June 21. On that date, the game also came to Xbox consoles and the Nintendo Switch. The game disappeared from Steam at the request of the publisher. The PC version is now only on the Epic Games Store. Epic acquired Fall Guys developer Mediatonic last year.

It is not the first time that Epic buys a game and then makes it free-to-play. That happened before with Rocket League. Game publishers earn billions annually from such free games through the presence of in-game purchases and microtransactions.

Fall Guys