The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2022–2023
Babylon's Fall: PlatinumGames' live-service gamble shut down in 11 months
PlatinumGames' online action game peaked at 1,188 Steam players, collapsed to one, and Square Enix pulled the plug 11 months after launch.
PlatinumGames · Square Enix · 2022-03-03
What happened
Babylon's Fall — a live-service online action game from PlatinumGames, the studio behind Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, published by Square Enix — launched March 3, 2022 on PS4, PS5 and PC. The pitch was an always-online cooperative brawler with seasonal content, a genre Platinum had never shipped.
Players did not come. The game peaked at 1,188 concurrent players on Steam around launch, decayed through the year, and by May 2022 had fallen to a single concurrent player. In Japan the first week's physical sales were 2,885 units on PS4 and 2,224 on PS5 — a fraction of one of Platinum's hits.
Square Enix announced the shutdown on September 13, 2022, roughly six months after release, and terminated all online services on February 27, 2023. The game was removed from sale and its live-service data deleted. Platinum's own staff later admitted that building an online title was "a lot harder to do than we thought."
Why it happened
- The genre bet was outside the studio's lane: Platinum built its name on single-player action, not on running a durable multiplayer service — a skill it had never shown.
- The launch landed hostile: generally unfavorable reviews (Metacritic 41–46, OpenCritic 3% recommend) sank any word-of-mouth before a live-service game could build a base.
- The live-service economics were unforgiving: with a few hundred players and no seasonal momentum, the support costs outran any revenue, so the shutdown was a scheduled bill, not a surprise.
The lesson
A studio's name does not carry a live-service game alone: Platinum's single-player pedigree meant nothing once the product needed a persistent audience — scope the genre to the team's real capability.
Sources
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