Fall Guys pushes the Epic Games Store to a new record player count

Fall Guys
(Image credit: Mediatonic)

Fall Guys went free to play last week, a change that also saw it leave Steam and become an Epic Games Store exclusive. Despite that change in storefronts, the Fall Guys player count on Steam saw a huge spike too—nearly five times as many concurrent players at its peak as in the previous month. Unsurprisingly, it's also doing pretty well on Epic, which set a new record for active players on June 21, the day Fall Guys went free.

"A huge week for Fall Guys with more than 2x their previous PC CCU record, contributing to a record number of active players for the store last Tuesday," Epic tweeted. "Thank you to all the new beans! Always stumbling, never not stumbling."

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Epic clarified that the "record number of active players" refers to the cumulative number of active players on the storefront over the course of the day, and that Fall Guys "strongly" contributed to the total.

Player numbers for individual games on the Epic Store aren't readily available, but fortunately they are on Steam, which enables us to draw some reasonable conclusions. According to Steamcharts, the all-time peak concurrent player count for Fall Guys on Steam is 172,026, which conservatively puts the total number at 350,000 on Tuesday. It's impossible to say whether or not that includes players on Steam, but either way it's awfully healthy.

Speaking of which, Fall Guys is continuing to bang on Steam too, despite not being available for purchase there, achieving a peak concurrent player count of more than 56,500 today. Mediatonic said that all told, Fall Guys racked up 20 million total players over the first two days after going free to play.

That sort of sudden uptick in players is bound to bring about a few challenges, and Mediatonic is still rolling out updates to handle the new load. The latest, which went out earlier today, makes the following changes:

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  • PS5 Players will now be able to get into games whilst in a Party! wooooooooo!
  • Teams will no longer spawn in the same place on Team Rounds 
  • Fixed visual issue with Spawn FX on Nintendo Switch 
  • Fixed visual issue with Lilypad effects on Nintendo Switch 
  • Fixed buttons not working on Leading Light
  • Fixed some static intro cameras 
  • Fixed issue with Airtime and Sweet Thieves intro cams not following the intended path 
  • Fixed some invisible tiles loading in on Hex-a-Gone 
  • Fixed bug which caused Party members to stay in queue, despite a new player joining the party
  • Fixed issue which caused a freeze when changing controller during bindings 
  • Fixed visual issue when grabbing on a turntable 
  • Fixed grabbed Beans not following the movement of mobile platforms 
  • Fixed padlock not being removed from Season Pass once bought
  • Fixed some graphical corruptions on respawn VFX
  • Fixed issue with controller inputs not consistently being recorded after the bind button pop-up appears
  • Fixed issue causing other player's Beans animations to become stuck during gameplay
  • Fixed bug which prevented players from hearing party members in Voice Chat 

Unfortunately, Mediatonic had to disable the Daily Store while it works on some persistent issues, but said it should be back online ASAP.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.