Fallout over Fall Guys free to play goes nuclear thanks to store bug, now being worked on

Fall Guys has encountered a number of bugs since going free to play at the start of this month, and it’s starting to seriously annoy players.

Update: Mediatonic has responded to calls from the community and says that the store bug is recognised and a fix is being worked on. The join statement from Epic Games and Mediatonic reads:

“What is happening in the game is not intended and we are actively fixing it. The customer service response was also not acceptable and we will offer a make good for all affected”

In addition, they released this tweet:

We heard your feedback on accidental purchases - and we're sorry!

To make it right:

✨ We’re improving the store design to prevent this
✨ All refund requests for cosmetics from 21st June 2022 will be honoured until we improve the store
✨ We’re giving everyone GRANDIS 👇 pic.twitter.com/L7Bsz9nbg8

— Fall Guys... FREE FOR ALL! 👑 (@FallGuysGame) July 15, 2022

While that’s likely the end of this particular drama, it seems likely that community complaints will remain high in the wake of the game going free to play until people get used to it. Additional content and good patches will help ease this.

Original story: Fall Guys was the internet darling and a wonderful mix of hardcore and casual gameplay on launch in 2020, five months into a little thing called the COVID-19 pandemic. It blew up in a way few games do and no games dare hope for, proving to be exactly the sort of low-frills, well-developed fun people wanted and did well on Twitch.

Since going free-to-play, it’s been less well-loved by the community of bean-runners it attracted. Essentially a game show, Fall Guys has you control a highly-customisable guy, who resembles a bean, through various platforming challenges, with the aim of finishing first or scoring highest for victories.

Originally, big wins would earn you crowns, which you could then spend on outfits and other customisations for your character. Going free to play changed that whole system, and it’s always been controversial with those who were playing since the start. Now, a new bug is allegedly causing players to accidentally purchase items they don’t want, and it’s lit a fire in the community.

Reports have been coming in for over a week, with the first response suggesting developers Mediatonic and their new owners at Epic Games weren’t going to do anything about it being posted 7 days ago. Since then, one user has created a thread featuring 70 users (out of the 50 million they’ve had in the past two weeks) that have experienced this bug.

Another user, who goes by ChunkyPeat on Reddit, posted an email he claimed was from Mediatonic, telling him in no uncertain terms that they do not regard it to be a bug and would not be refunding him. As reported by VGC, replies from the community were not positive, calling the response Peat received rude.

The Fall Guys store, currently running a promotion for Pusheen tie-in skins.

This video has been cited multiple times as being the best evidence, the purchase seemingly going through without any additional input from the user. In this case it is for the Show Bucks currency that is either earned rarely through a battle pass or paid for in real money – in other words, it has some pretty decent value, rather than being a free currency anyone who plays the game has thousands of.

The drama is being further redoubled by general community annoyance with the price of skins since the move to free to play. A glance at the top posts of the last month will show you the number of comparisons made to full-price games and the like. It’s been a tough pill to swallow for those who were used to purchasing whatever they liked with all their crowns – currency earned for winning games of Fall Guys before the move to F2P.

It also has causes linked to the wider gaming community’s dislike of Epic Games and free to play, both of which are continuously fuelled by miscommunication from developers, poor management of communities, and the endless list of poor business practices. People, also, simply do not like change.

All that said, to call the bug well known and widespread seems a bit of a stretch – 70 people is less than 0.00014% of Fall Guys’ player base in the past month. 0.00014% of the world’s population lives on the island of Nauru for comparison’s sake.

Almost nothing is known about this bug too. No doubt some are false positives caused by dodgy controllers or people who want stuff for free, but enough folks swear blind that isn’t the case it’s hard to ignore. Server lag, poorly coded UI, and other simple issues could be causing it.

Oddest of all is certainly the denial from Mediatonic that anything is going on and there is no bug. We’ve reached out to them and other parties for comment and will update if we hear more.

Written by GLHF.