Babylon’s Fall Belly-Flops On Release With Less Than 700 Steam Players

The jokes here sort of write themselves, but Babylon’s Fall, Square Enix, and Platinum Games’ new action-adventure game appears to be dead-on-arrival, peaking at less than 650 concurrent players on Steam on its launch day. (Source: VGC.)

This particular title was announced at E3 2018 to plenty of excitement. This is the two companies’ second collaboration following NieR: Automata, but the room chilled significantly when it was re-revealed in 2021 as a “live-service” title.

Stacking Babylon’s Fall up against another (likely much more expensive, but still) Square Enix live-service game, Marvel’s Avengers peaked at 28,000 concurrent Steam players. It was later declared a financial disappointment by the company. Babylon’s Fall has just 2.3% of those already-low numbers.

This is also yet another in a growing list of Square Enix titles featuring ill-advised demos (after Balan Wonderworld and Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece), as the network test for Babylon’s Fall was received relatively poorly due to extremely pervasive monetization in the full-priced game. Overwhelmingly, the beta test seemed to be more of a turn-off than an exciting taste of the experience.

We don’t know much about the success of the console release yet – the game is out but received very little promotion thanks to coming out in a highly packed release window (only weeks after Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West). There is a physical version, but it appears to have been dramatically short-printed. As a result, it is only being sold online despite retail presence being an essential factor in the success of physical releases for AAA titles.

It’s also noteworthy that one element of this lack of promotion is that seemingly no review outlets appear to have received copies of Babylon’s Fall to actually review. As a result, the game’s Metacritic pages are almost barren, featuring only one review each for the PlayStation 5 and PC versions of the game (one of which is an 80, stating that the reviewer enjoyed it but that they were frequently frustrated and the game might take too long to really become consistently enjoyable, and the other being a 20, criticizing the game’s graphics and narrative and calling it a boring cash-grab).

Noisy Pixel will keep an eye out and report on the inevitable fallout of this release.