Fall Guys didn't fit the premium format. It should have been free from the very beginning

Our Chinese colleagues from GameLook have published informative material about why Fall Guys needed to become free for real success. To put it very briefly: a game that is designed for mass, the price tag only hinders.

The article can be found here (Google translates decently from Chinese to English), and we will focus on a couple of points from it. There are no discoveries, just a few curious observations.

So, last week, Fall Guys left Steam for the Epic Games Store, and at the same time became a frituplein. This had a positive effect on the size of her audience. In the first 48 hours after the update, 20 million users entered the project.

Up to this point, online games, despite the release of add-ons, had a downward trend.

The dynamics of Fall Guys online on Steam since January 2022, the growth at the end is due to the free (Steamdb)
It is important to understand here that the success of Fall Guys has always been associated with free distribution.

At the start, the game was included in the PS Plus line. In other words, it was free for subscribers of the service. This provided her with a huge virality. For subscription, the game has become the most downloaded project in history.

It is this virality that has led to significant sales on Steam. On the Valve platform, the game sold 7 million copies in the first month of sales.

However, after the game ceased to be free on PS Plus, its affairs on Steam went immediately worse. Online at first fell from 170 thousand to 20 thousand, and then to 10 thousand at all.

The dynamics of Fall Guys online on Steam from August 2020 to February 2021, the growth at the beginning will coincide with the free games on PS Plus (Steamdb)
And it remained at this level until the project became free a week ago.

So GameLook believes that the premium format of Fall Guys was not suitable. The game is aimed at mass, at social interaction. Any price tag “at the entrance” interfered with the project.

Actually, the latest results of the game, which has changed the monetization model, clearly demonstrate this.

By the way, our colleagues cite Stumble Guys as the right approach to working with users. This is a clone of Fall Guys from Finnish developers from Kitka Games.

Stumble Guys
The game is distributed for free from the release.

As a result of this June, the game was released on mobile devices at the level of 30 million installations per month and at the box office at $ 6 million.

Dynamics of Stumble Guys’ mobile downloads and revenue (AppMagic)
There is no data on Steam sales, but the game has been higher online since March than Fall Guys.

The dynamics of Stumble Guys online on Steam since March 2022