Babylon’s Fall, the new hack and slash multiplayer game from Square Enix and PlatinumGames, appeared to hit a new low this week, with its concurrent PC player count briefly dropping to just eight users.
As noted by Tech Radar, the online game has struggled to attract more than 100 concurrent players throughout this week, and on April 13 it briefly dropped below ten users, according to tracking site SteamDB.
Babylon’s Fall got off to a slow start on PC immediately following its release late last month, peaking at fewer than 650 concurrent players on Steam on its release day.
BABYLON’S FALL | Combat 101 Trailer
For comparison, another live game published by Square Enix, Marvel’s Avengers, saw around 28,000 concurrent players at launch. That game would eventually be branded as a failure by Square Enix’s bosses. Another Square Enix game, Outriders, peaked at 125,000 players.
The game was also widely-panned by critics. According to review aggregator Metacritic, the title is by far the worst reviewed game so far on PS5 and the worst game of the year.
Despite the game’s slow start, Square Enix and PlatinumGames have insisted that Babylon’s Fall development is not in danger.
The title’s poor reception seemingly encouraged the pair to address its future plans for the title, with a Twitter image published last month titled: “Is the continuing service in danger?”
Babylon’s Fall dropped to less than 10 concurrent PC players this week.
The post insisted that there are “no plans to reduce the scale of development” on Babylon’s Fall, and claimed that content up until the game’s second season is “practically complete”, with work on Season 3 already started.
“In the future, Babylon’s Fall will almost certainly be frequently used as an example of how not to launch a live service game,” opens VGC’s review of the game.
“Not only does it fail at the most basic elements, such as a visual style that’s incredibly unappealing, or a mission structure that is somehow both dreadfully short and tedious, but the game also tries desperately to establish itself as a live game, filling your screen with as many opportunities to micro-transact as it can, despite the fact it actually costs $60 to purchase.”
