So long, Fortnite. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout just unexpectedly became the most popular battle royale on Twitch today. | Source: Mediatonic/Devolver Digital
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has only been out for a few hours, and it’s already a hit. The 60-player battle royale from Mediatonic is crushing Fortnite fandom on Twitch, so much so that the developer is struggling to cope with the demand.
After being teased and thoroughly enjoyed by some top tier streamers over the past few weeks, Fall Guys released today on both PC and PlayStation 4 as one of August’s batch of PlayStation Plus freebies .
The Takeshi’s Castle-inspired game has already surged to the top of the Global Top Sellers list on Steam . It’s ousted some serious competition from the likes of Obsidian’s recently-launched Grounded and PlayStation’s first proper PC push: Horizon Zero Dawn.
It’s not just selling well. Absolutely everyone is scrambling to play it too.
Taking to Twitter a few hours ago, Mediatonic announced that roughly 120,000 players were playing concurrently , causing all manner of issues for the developer’s server team.
The uptake “skyrocketed” past even Mediatonic’s most ambitious launch expectations, leading it to switch off matchmaking to “beef” up the Fall Guys servers.
We’re going to switch off matchmaking for 30 mins so that we can BEEF the servers up to MAXIMUM BEEF We’ve basically skyrocketed right past our ‘absolute highest number of expected players for the entire day’
We just need 30 mins to brace ourselves and we should be okay.
A couple of hours and a string of spirited tweets later, Mediatonic revealed its 30-minute time frame to get Fall Guys up and running again might have been somewhat ambitious.
We’re still fixing things, we probably shouldn’t have tried to guess how long it would take
Very soon™ though
Anyone got any spicy Fall Guys memes to pass the time?
Over on Twitch, Fall Guys is having an equally good day. The game currently holds the top spot as the most viewed game on the Amazon-owned streaming platform.
Over 504,000 viewers are tuned in as of Tuesday afternoon, aided by the likes of xQc and CohhCarnage streaming the game.
That puts it miles ahead of streaming mainstays like Grand Theft Auto V (163,000 viewers), League of Legends (186,000), Fortnite (172,000), and Call of Duty: Warzone (167,000). It’s even dominating the “Just Chatting” category, which currently boasts 242,000 viewers.