Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been the gaming sensation story of 2020 so far following its release for free for PS4 users back in August. Taking inspiration from classic shows such as Takeshi’s Castle or Total Wipeout, the game sees players take hold of their very own jelly bean character and attempt to complete a series of minigames against other players, with the slowest or least successful of these being eliminated at the end of each game.
Some games revolve around scaling through an obstacle course and reaching a finish line and some revolve around strategy and teamwork, and the game has already established itself as one of the most popular party games for big groups of friends to jump into. The colourful visuals, free to play model and light-hearted tone have made the game one of the very few good things to have become popular during the coronavirus pandemic, with sales of the game on Steam alone reaching seven million sales on Steam and a record for the highest amount of monthly downloads from the PS Plus in August.
But, perhaps surprisingly, Fall Guys has yet to really break into the lucrative world of streaming. Here’s just how badly the game is doing according to TwitchMetrics, and why exactly Fall Guys just isn’t a game meant to be streamed.
Twitch Metrics
Put bluntly, Fall Guys really hasn’t broken the streaming world in the ways some might have expected for a game with the cultural impact the game has had. Though it did top the Twitch charts as the world’s most watched game following its closed beta release back in July, Fall Guys has pretty much been on a downward spiral since then.
At the time of writing this article, Fall Guys has averaged roughly 19,000 viewers at a time across October on the streaming platform. Whilst it might not sound like a bad haul on its own, it’s only enough to see it enter in at no. 23 in the most watched games on the site. At any time over the course of the month, Fall Guys has averaged 116 active channels playing the game and reached a peak viewership of 283,000, though that was following the release of Season 2 earlier this month.
For reference, League of Legends has an average viewership of 23,000 with 515 active channels at any given time, with a peak viewership of over one million users. CS:GO has 69,000 active viewers, 184 active channels and a peak viewership of 435,000, Fifa 21 broke past 63,000 active viewers, saw roughly 172 active channels over the course of the month and a peak viewership of over 270,000 following its release day.
We could go on and on, but we reckon you get the point here.
But Why?
Check out a site like Unikrn, the home of Esports betting and all the latest news and insights from the world of gaming, for a better idea of why Fall Guys hasn’t been able to crack the world of streaming; however, the reality could be far simpler than you might think:
No one’s watching a stream of the game because everyone’s playing it. Free to download, it’s not the most inaccessible of titles out there, so why would someone bother watching the exact same minigames played over and over again when they can do it themselves?
On top of that, there aren’t any betting markets or wagering opportunities for fans of the games to invest into, or high profile events or competitions in the Esports community Fall Guys can point to yet.
For the time being, Fall Guys looks set to remain a fun, massively popular party game rather than the next big streaming title taking the gaming community by storm.