Square Enix’s Babylon’s Fall was such a misfire, GameStop is giving it away for free

polygon.com:

Babylon’s Fall, the action RPG from developer PlatinumGames and publisher Square Enix, has seen better days. Not many, mind you, but indisputably better. We had modest hopes for it back when it was re-revealed in 2021 before it launched, but… well, that was before it launched.

Platinum’s latest is doing badly right now. So badly that Square Enix announced last week that it’s terminating the game’s live service on Feb. 27, 2023, wiping the gameplay data and its Hanging Garden player site less than a year after it launched. So badly that the game’s 24-hour player count peak on SteamDB has plummeted from 1,188 to around… six players in just a month. So badly that some GameStop locations are giving it away like it’s free real estate, as reported by Cheap Ass Gamer.

Just tried it, in fact worked pic.twitter.com/x4auugtHP7

Polygon reached out to three GameStop locations to confirm this report, with two confirming that the game is no longer listed to be sold and offering to give copies away to anyone willing to pick them up.

Now, I can understand the prospect of picking up a copy of a game that’s practically not going to exist anymore in approximately five months is a hard sell, even if it is free. That said, there’s an undeniable novelty to preserving your very own copy of a legendarily bad game; just ask any savvy videogame historian who snatched up a copy of Too Human or Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa before they got dumped in a landfill. There are dozens of us! Dozens!