Babylon's Fall

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~ the obit ~

Babylon's Fall's whole run overlaps with my late thirties at a desk in Ankara, and a sixty dollar live-service game on PlayStation was never something I was going to buy. I know PlatinumGames the way most people know them, by reputation and by the games that got talked about. This one got talked about for an entirely different reason.

PlatinumGames made Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. Those are single-player action games with a heavy directorial hand, and the studio's reputation was built on combat that pays you back for learning it properly. In 2017, around the time Nier: Automata shipped, they started work on something else. Square Enix published it, and it was revealed at E3 2018 with a 2019 date attached to it.

It did not come out in 2019. It surfaced again at Sony's State of Play in December 2019 with the first gameplay anyone had seen. By the time it came back at E3 2021 it had been relabeled a game as a service. In 2020 PlatinumGames had opened a new Tokyo studio specifically to build live-service games for consoles, so the pivot was neither accidental nor hidden.

One of the directors, Takahisa Sugiyama, said afterwards that building an online live-service title was a lot harder to do than we thought. That sentence is most of the grave.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

It released on 3 March 2022 for PlayStation and Windows, with Deluxe buyers let in three days early. The all-time concurrent peak on Steam was 1,188 players, reached on 4 March, the day after launch. That is the number at the top.

In May 2022, Eurogamer reported that the concurrent count on Steam had fallen to one. Not one thousand. One person, somewhere, playing a Square Enix game published two months earlier that had cost five years of a famous studio's time. Metacritic put it at 46 on PC and 41 on PS5. It went onto the site's list of the ten worst games of the year at number three, and OpenCritic recorded three percent of critics recommending it.

~ how it actually ended ~

The last story content shipped on 31 May 2022 as an update called The Light of Aaru, and it did finish the plot. Players killed the final boss and ended the plague the whole story had been about. Three and a half months later, on 13 September, Square Enix and PlatinumGames announced that development had stopped and gave the shutdown date at the same time.

The servers went off on 27 February 2023, four days short of a year from release. The game had been fully finished and fully abandoned inside the same twelve months, which is a rare combination to pull off. Most live-service failures die mid-sentence instead.

~ what came after ~

Square Enix wrote the loss off and kept moving. The interesting casualty here is the idea itself. A studio whose entire value was hand-tuned single-player combat spent five years learning to build the opposite thing, and by the time it arrived the market it had been built for was already full of incumbents nobody was leaving.

There is no way to play Babylon's Fall now. It was online-only on every platform it shipped on, so the disc and the license stopped meaning anything on the same afternoon. Whatever the game actually was underneath the reviews, the answer is only available secondhand from here on.

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