The popularity of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been a big surprise to everyone, no more so than developer Mediatonic. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, lead game designer Joe Walsh explains while they expected the game to eventually recoup its development costs, nobody expected it to do so in just four hours. More content is on the way to sate the appetite of players, with season 3.5 due to arrive soon.
The title sold 11 million copies on Steam. No exact PS4 sales figures are available, but the game has totalled more than 8 million players and became the most downloaded PS+ game of all time. There’s no doubt that launching on PlayStation Plus helped the game’s popularity and CEO Dave Bailey says the team is “definitely glad we took the decision to go to PlayStation Plus.” Walsh says he thought it “might take six months or a year to break even. Fall Guys did it in about four hours.” The developer’s second biggest game made $10-15 million in lifetime sales. Fall Guys has already beaten that and has added “some noughts onto that” after just three months.
Post-launch updates and additions were already in development for the live service title, but the team also wasn’t quite prepared for how demanding their fans could be. Season 2 introduced 40 new levels on a random rotation, yet their data showed many players had managed to play all of them in just a couple of days. Season 3 saw even more players return and play for longer than anything seen in Season 2.
The company has now recruited more developers with an aim to double the team’s size, but they refuse to “overcommit to things we can’t do because there’s a lag between hiring new people and growing the content.” The next major game update will be Season 3.5, which will add a new level, more than 40 variants of existing levels, Fall Feed, a new DLC pack, new shows and costumes. The Godzilla, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Goose Game costumes will also be available from the regular store.
The mid-season update is due to arrive soon and more content will continue to follow. Season 4 will “step things up a gear in terms of the excitement” and the art team has “completely knocked it out of the park with our roster of costumes” for the season. After that, who knows? The game was always meant to last for several years, and the team hopes its popularity may be so that it can continue indefinitely.
[Source: GamesIndustry.biz, Twitter]
