After what feels like an eternity, Square Enix and PlatinumGame’s Babylon’s Fall has finally arrived for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC through Steam. The game officially released on March 3, and it, unfortunately, is not doing very well within the community, being fairly lambasted on Metacritic for a number of reasons. The game’s launch on Steam was especially noticeable as it was pointed out by Video Game Chronicles that its concurrent player base peaked on release day at a measly 650 users.
On its release day, Babylon’s Fall has peaked at fewer than 650 concurrent players on Steam.https://t.co/Qlu0OlFpb1 pic.twitter.com/NV3T7bZv6G
— VGC (@VGC_News) March 3, 2022
The numbers have since fluctuated but anyway you try to extrapolate this, it isn’t a great start for a game that’s a live service title. As we stated earlier, Babylon’s Fall released just a couple of days ago, but it’s already been the recipient of several complaints and criticisms. For instance, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann essentially called the title one of the worst games to ever make a first bad impression on him, and this is coming from someone who’s been in the industry for a very long time. This is especially bad since PlatinumGames recently hinted at the prospect of making more live-service titles, and making it a focus for their entire development team.
In hindsight, Babylon’s Fall has also gone through some major changes. It was initially revealed during E3 2018 during Square Enix’s press conference as a hack and slash JRPG. It was then reintroduced at E3 2021 as a live-service title, which confused fans, especially with a fully priced MSRP. For the time being it hasn’t panned out too well. Still, there’s plenty of time for PlatinumGames to turn it around, but for the moment, Babylon’s Fall is looked at as a failure in the video game community.