Fall Guys raises $1 million for Special Effect charity

(Image credit: Mediatonic)

Two weeks ago Fall Guys tapped into the brand madness on Twitter, challenging the various corporations that were tirelessly pitching Fall Guys costume concepts to donate to charity. The deal was, the top bidder after two weeks would get a Fall Guys skin added to the battle royale, with the money going to Special Effect, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of gamers with disabilities.

Things kicked off quickly, with a series of ever-increasing pledges flying in from server hosting businesses to indie game companies to individual streamers. Even a bidet company wanted in. Before long, bids had climbed from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, and they just kept climbing.

Cut to this morning, and gaming channel FGTeev was locked in with a pledge for a whopping $510,000. As the final seconds of "Battle of the Brands" ticked away, however, a new bid arrived and nearly doubled it.

See more

Streamers Ninja and MrBeast, along with G2 Esports and Aim Lab, joined forces to combine their bids to equal a cool $1 million. Contest over. According to Mediatonic, four costumes will be added to Fall Guys to celebrate the winning bidders' collaboration.

That's an excellent result and a massive donation. What would be cooler is if some or all of the non-winning bids still donated to Special Effect, don't you think? Just because you don't get a skin in Fall Guys doesn't mean you can't still donate. And Fall Guys, which has sold 7 million copies on Steam, could choose to match the high bid with its own donation. That'd be pretty cool, too!

If you're interested in helping out Special Effect yourself, there are a number of ways to do it. Learn more about the charity here, and don't forget we're giving away a free wireless headset each month all year to help support the good work they do.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.