Shroud Voices Doubts About Fall Guys

Fall Guys Characters Football
Image credit: Devolver Digital

Since its release, Fall Guys has been a massive sensation in gaming and attracted the interest of major brands. Yet one of the biggest streamers on the planet believes it may “die real quick.”

The Latest of the Greatest

Seemingly out of nowhere, Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout became a massive hit almost immediately. Barely two weeks since its release on August 4, the game matched the Twitch viewership of the online juggernaut League of Legends, and it is giving Riot Games’ MOBA a run for its money despite the ongoing playoffs. The Fall Guys social media team even poked some fun at this, getting a seemingly positive reply. Everyone loves a certain mushroom-gathering little fuzzy creature, right?

Many streamers quickly jumped on the new title and some were richly rewarded for it. Timothy “TimTheTatman” John Betar, who quickly got an online reputation as the worst player in the game after an insanely long losing streak, posted a recap of the stream which contained his first victory and it was almost mind-boggling: over 180,000 average viewers, peak viewership of nearly 350,000 and almost 1.3 million unique viewers.

Shroud: A Doubter Appears

With these numbers - and the wealth of big names in streaming the game attracts - success seems inevitable - but at least one big name in gaming does not agree. One of streaming’s biggests names, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek gave the game a try on stream and he was not blown away. It is hard to overestimate Shroud’s popularity - he has the third biggest number of Twitch subscribers and after returning to the platform he immediately picked up where he left off, getting nearly 3 million unique views for his returning stream with the platform. Yet for the star streamer, Fall Guys is more likely to be a flash in the pan than the next big thing.

Here's what he said about the game during his stream:

“Fall Guys is gonna die real quick, for sure. After playing it, there’s no way it will be any more exciting for any longer,”

Hoo boy. This is, to put it mildly, not a popular opinion on the internet right now. Yet it is hard to immediately dismiss it as just talking smack to raise controversy. Unlike more than a few big streamers, so far getting people riled up for more views has not been Shroud’s style. It is likely that he does believe that Mediatonic’s hit game does not have what it takes to assure longevity.

However, he did qualify his statement and stated that this could change if the game gets more maps - weekly. While this is not likely to happen any time soon, it is quite likely that Mediatonic will be looking for ways to keep the game fresh. They certainly have the budget to do so now, considering Fall Guys’ sales and the interest so many major brands have shown in it.

It is likely that the summer sensation will not be able to sustain its viewership at the current level, though expecting it to die anytime soon might be a bit too much. However, Shroud has hit on an issue that is hard to argue with: a big part of Fall Guys’ future lies with Mediatonic producing new content to keep the game fresh. They have hit on a great idea - all that’s left is to see how well they can build on it.

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