The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2022
Babylon's Fall shipped as an always-online game and fell to 1 PC player within months
Square Enix and PlatinumGames kept a poorly received live-service action RPG on its original release date and shut its servers within a year.
Square Enix · PlatinumGames · 2022-03-03
What happened
Square Enix and action-game studio PlatinumGames built Babylon's Fall as an always-online, live-service action RPG, first revealed in 2018 for a planned 2019 launch. A closed beta in 2021 was criticized for dated visuals and repetitive combat, but the release date held. The game shipped March 3, 2022 largely unchanged from what the beta had already shown reviewers didn't want.
Reception confirmed the beta's warning: Metacritic scores landed at 46 (PC) and 41 (PS5), and OpenCritic recorded a 3% recommend rate. Steam concurrent players peaked at 1,188 on launch day and collapsed to a single player by May 2022. Japanese first-week physical sales were 2,885 PS4 and 2,224 PS5 units, too low to chart.
Square Enix announced it was ending content updates in September 2022, six months after launch, and shut the servers down entirely on February 27, 2023 — turning an always-online game unplayable less than a year after release.
Why it happened
- A 2021 closed beta already showed the visuals and combat loop weren't landing, and the release date wasn't moved to address it.
- The game was built always-online with no offline mode, so a server shutdown erased the entire product rather than leaving a playable single-player game behind.
- Live-service games depend on a sustained player base to justify ongoing costs; a launch player count in the low thousands never reached the scale needed to sustain it.
- Square Enix chose to end support within a year rather than continue funding a game that had already lost its audience.
The lesson
An always-online game that ignores its own beta feedback isn't just betting on launch reviews — it's betting the whole product's lifespan on players it hasn't convinced yet.
Aftermath
Babylon's Fall became a reference case for the risk of always-online design without an offline fallback: once the servers closed, the game was permanently unplayable, unlike a single-player flop that can still be replayed. Director Takahisa Sugiyama later said the studio underestimated how much harder live-service development was than expected. PlatinumGames continued operating on other projects.
Sources
- Babylon's Fall Will Be Shut Down In February 2023 — IGN
- Babylon's Fall's concurrent PC player count fell to just one this week — Eurogamer
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