‘Babylon’s Fall’ peaks at just 1,179 concurrent PC players on release day

Babylon’s Fall, a cooperative action RPG from Square Enix, has peaked at just over a thousand concurrent PC players in the game’s first 24 hours.

The multiplayer hack and slash game went live on Steam at 17:00 GMT yesterday (March 3) and in the following 22 hours, only 1,179 people played the title at the same time, according to SteamDB.

For comparison, Square Enix employees around 5,500 people. Marvel’s Avengers (another live game published by the studio) saw around 28,000 concurrent players at launch and was subsequently branded a failure.

Babylon’s Fall was first announced at E3 2018 with a planned release date of 2019. After delays, the studio confirmed in 2020 that the title was still in development.

Despite a series of trailers and a beta test though, it looks like Babylon’s Fall has failed to generate much buzz. According to the 74 Steam reviews, the title is getting a “mixed” reception.

Last year, Final Fantasy director Naoki Yoshida confirmed that Babylon’s Fall reuses assets originally designed for Final Fantasy 14.

“I said, ‘Let’s use FF14’s assets too. We have so many, it’d be a shame to limit them to FF14 alone,’ and that’s how it all started,” explained Yoshida, before clarifying that all borrowed assets “will be fully supervised by the Final Fantasy 14 team to ensure that they fit into its world”.

In other news, Twitch has updated its community guidelines to help prevent the spread of misinformation on the platform.

The move is set to target  “Twitch users who persistently share harmful misinformation” both on and off the platform.

Announcing the changes, Twitch published a blog that said: “We’re proud that we can bring people together – but we do not believe that individuals who use online services to spread false, harmful information, have a place in our community. While these individuals are not prevalent on Twitch, they could cause significant harm if allowed on our service.”