Skip to main content

The fall guys: why big multiplayer games almost always collapse at launch

When Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout suddenly stopped working after a successful launch, the developers were blamed. But the reasons for such outages are complex

On 4 August, British game studio Mediatonic launched a colourful and self-consciously silly game entitled Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, in which 60 players compete in zany challenges straight out of Takeshi’s Castle. After beta testing well, it attracted some online buzz, so the developer was prepared for a modestly successful opening day with maybe a couple of hundred thousand participants. Within 24 hours, more than 1.5m people attempted to play.

What happened next has become a familiar story in the world of online multiplayer games: the servers collapsed, the game stopped working and Mediatonic was inundated with furious complaints. Pretty soon, Fall Guys was being review-bombed on Metacritic by petulant players accusing the team of laziness and cynicism. Didn’t they prepare properly for launch? Why didn’t they see this coming?

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gAqJyt

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It’s Green Day’s World Now

The band’s new album, “Saviors,” feels amazingly current, not because Green Day has capitulated to the whims of the Zeitgeist but because, somehow, the Zeitgeist has bent around Green Day. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/Oz8Atxq