Babylon’s Fall is the latest PS5 console exclusive – and it looks like it’s flopped

techradar.com:

Babylon’s Fall, the latest online hack-and-slash action RPG from Square Enix and Platinum Games, has launched to a thoroughly tepid reception.

Released on PS5, PS4 and PC on March 3, the game looks to have struggled to pull in an audience, peaking at only 650 concurrent players on Steam since launch (thanks, VGC). At press time, its PC player count is floating at a rather meager 574, after dipping to a low of 66 a few hours earlier.

Although player stats on PlayStation consoles aren’t available, we can likely expect a similar turnout for Sony’s systems.

For comparison, even the ailing Battlefield 2042 has been able to consistently draw close to 2,000 concurrent daily players, despite seeing an exodus of fans since the bug-ridden game launched last year, and slipping below the player count of the nine-year-old Battlefield 4.

Reviews of Babylon’s Fall don’t cast the game in a better light. User reviews on Steam are currently 'mixed', with several players admonishing its excessive microtransactions and graphics, while others have praised its core dungeon-crawling gameplay loop. Even its Metacritic page remains all but empty, with critics largely ignoring the title.

Babylon’s Fall was never going to have an easy ride. The game’s release has been swamped by larger triple-A titles of the past few weeks, including Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring, which has almost single-handedly captured the attention of the gaming world.

Its launch day was further disrupted by a period of unscheduled emergency maintenance, which shut down the servers of the primarily-multiplayer game for a couple of hours. That left the, admittedly small, online community around the game voicing their disappointment.

But even before release, Babylon’s Fall had