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Catastrophic sales figures: Blockbuster game immediately starts as a flop

7.3.2022

Translation: machine translated

The launch of Babylon's Fall is the epitome of a flop, and that despite big names like PlatinumGames and Square Enix: catastrophically low player numbers, hardly any reviews and a lack of public interest let the game disappear into insignificance. One of the reasons for this might have been the misleading marketing.

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PlatinumGames, the developers behind Nier Automata and Bayonetta, and Square Enix, publisher of countless gigantically successful role-playing games. A match made in Heaven - you'd think. But the launch of Babylon's Fall went disastrously, and not only because all current releases are overshadowed by the enormous success of Elden Ring. But how big is the extent of the failure really?

Disastrous player numbers on Steam

Already at release, the interest in Babylon's Fall obviously couldn't be lower: On Steam, the game initially only reached a number of concurrent players of 650, according to SteamDB; in the meantime, the game has climbed to just over 1000 concurrent players, after all. An abysmal failure when you look at other games at launch.

For comparison: Even Battlefield 2042, which has since disappeared into oblivion, still had around 2000 concurrent players at its absolute low point, i.e. double the number - not to mention its best case with around 105,000 players. Dying Light 2 even impressed with 250,000 concurrent players shortly after launch and Elden Ring gallops away from everyone anyway with more than 900,000 concurrent players.

Abysmal ratings for Babylon's Fall

It's not just a lack of interest that brings Babylon's Fall down, though: The absurdly few reviews are also tearing the title apart. On OpenCritic, Babylon's Fall achieves an average rating of 40% with just 10 reviews, and only 13% of the reviewers recommend the game.

Metacritic doesn't paint a better picture either: Babylon's Fall also only gets 41 points there, with a lousy number of just six reviews. Gamers also subscribe to this disastrous verdict: 69 reviews lift the player score to a mere 3.0, quite a total failure in the world of video game reviews.

Many journalists and gamers are unanimous in their criticisms: Babylon's Fall is uninspired and boring, the game lacks any form of its own identity. In addition, the full price despite microtransactions and Battle Pass, which is why many demonize the title as a cash grab.

How fatal was the misleading marketing?

It's hard to judge what exactly is the reason for the failure of Babylon's Fall. But there should be no denying that the game's misleading marketing was a major contributor. After all, the 2018 reveal and the first gameplay trailer that followed in 2019 made the game look like a classic single-player title and thus stoked corresponding expectations among fans.

Then, in 2021, they came around the corner with an unfortunately disappointing surprise: Babylon's Fall turned out to be a multiplayer title with live service elements, i.e. Battle Pass, seasonal content, and the rest of the buzzwords that this type of game entails. Fans were not only infuriated by the misleading trailer, but above all disappointed by the wasted potential.

Babylon's Fall was planned as a live service game from the beginning, as Junichi Ehara, the title's producer, revealed in an interview with JPGames. The reason for the fans' wrong assumption was that the decision was made for a longer commercial break due to experiments and the multiplayer aspect could not be shown at that time.

Ehara has since come to regret that decision, saying, "In hindsight, we could have handled it better." As the numbers on Steam, the number of reviews and the general interest in Babylon's Fall show, this boat seems to have sailed, unfortunately. So we can only hope that they learn from the mistakes they made.

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martin.jungfer@digitecgalaxus.ch

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