On its release day, Babylon’s Fall has peaked at fewer than 650 concurrent players on Steam

Babylon’s Fall, the new hack and slash multiplayer game from Square Enix and PlatinumGames, looks like it’s off to a slow start on PC.

The online game was released today on Steam and PlayStation consoles, and at the time of writing is outside of Steam’s 50 top sellers on Steam, peaking at fewer than 650 concurrent players on Steam on its release day according to SteamDB.

For comparison, another live game published by Square Enix, Marvel’s Avengers, saw around 28,000 concurrent players at launch. That game would eventually be branded as a failure by Square Enix’s bosses. Another Square Enix game, Outriders, peaked at 125,000 players.

The game, which costs $59.99 / £59.99 or $94.99 / £94.99 for the deluxe edition currently has 18 reviews on Steam, which the service classifies as mixed.

In reality, the reviews have been less than kind. One user describes the game as “looking and feeling like a bad PS2 port with micro-transaction”.

There are currently just over 3,000 people watching Babylon’s Fall being streamed, making it the 81st most-watched game on Twitch at the time of writing.

While there are few early reviews of the game, sentiment around it has been negative, particularly from players and journalists who’ve played so far.

Veteran Giant Bomb journalist Jeff Gerstmann, who has been in the games media for over 25 years, said: “I’m having trouble thinking of a full-price video game that has made a worse first impression on me than Babylon’s Fall.

“This game has a full-court press of battle passes, premium currencies and all this other stuff at launch that feels… presumptuous, in terms of the quality of the game and likelihood that people are going to want to engage with that. It feels very fucking crazy to me.”

He continued: “There are just aspects of this game all over it that just feel pretty low rent.”

Babylon’s Fall was first revealed in 2018 at Square Enix’s E3 press conference, however, news on the game went silent following the reveal. It was then re-revealed at E3 2021 where it was announced that the game would use the “games as a service” model, despite the fact that it was launching at full price.

Platinum opened a new Tokyo-based studio in 2020 to assist in the development of live games, with Babylon’s Fall being one of the first games produced in partnership with the new team.