What is Fall Guys?
and is on its way to replacing
Fortnite
as the new king of video games?
Fall Guys is a weird little game
about these bean
things
that run around obstacle courses
and it is very, very popular.
It's currently the
top selling game
on the Steam Store,
which is basically the number one place
where people
go to buy PC games.
And on PlayStation
it's an even bigger deal,
with a whopping 15 million
players
jumping online in its first fortnight.
Speaking of fortnights,
how big of a threat
is Fall guys
to the current video 
game top dog: Fortnite?
Just quickly,
if you don't
know what Fortnite is by now
that's genuinely impressive
because it is everywhere.
You can
play it on pretty much
any device you can think of,
including fridges -
not even kidding,
this is a real thing.
In 2019
Fortnite racked up billions of dollars
in profits,
but it wasn't just the year's
most profitable game.
It was also the year's most played game
on Twitch,
which is basically the number one
place where people go
to watch other people
playing video games.
But it's time at the top
could be coming to an end.
Right now Fortnite
isn't the most watched game on Twitch.
It's not even in the top five.
The current number
one is Fall Guys.
Just like Fortnite,
Fall Guys is a 'battle royale' game:
basically
when a huge number of players
are battling it out to be
 the last one standing.
It's a
genre that's become
incredibly popular over 
the past few years.
And while some of Fortnite's
direct competitors have enjoyed time
at the top of the charts,
none of them have been
able to stay there
and knock off Fortnite for good.
So, what's to say that Fall Guys
won't just be another Apex Legends?
Well, Fall Guys has a few things
going for it that
these games didn't.
For one thing,
it's completely different
to most other major 
battle royale games.
They mostly involve dropping onto an
island and killing your opponents
one by one
until you're the last one left.
Fall Guys on the other hand
is more like a wacky game
show
with obstacle courses and
 different challenges.
It still has that bright, fun
and colourful
aesthetic
that Fortnite does,
but it skips
a lot of the things that 
could be seen
as controversial,
like the guns and the violence,
which opens the game up
to a younger and much
bigger audience.
That being said,
parents should still be aware
that Fall Guys does
have microtransactions
where people can use
real money to buy cosmetic items
like wacky costumes
that don't actually affect the game
in any way.
If you're thinking that 
people probably
aren't going to spend real money
on outfits that aren't going 
to make them
actually better at the game,
just a reminder
that Fortnite made 
billions of dollars
selling this kind of stuff 
last year.
So, back to the big question:
Is Fall Guys the new Fortnite?
Not just yet.
For one thing, it doesn't make
anywhere near as much money
as Fortnite does.
It also has far fewer people
playing right now,
even if more are watching.
For Fall Guys
to completely
overtake Fortnite
it needs to prove it can stay
at the top of the charts
for longer than these games did.
And it needs
to grow the amount of people 
playing it
by a lot,
which may be tough to do
when your competitors game is free
and yours isn't.
For the time being
PlayStation subscribers
can get Fall Guys for free
thanks to a short
promo,
but if you want it on PC
you have to fork-out 
close to 30 bucks.
Also, Fall Guys
is currently
only available on PC and PlayStation,
which means there are about 65 million
Xbox players who are completely
missing out right now,
not to mention the massive
head-start
Fortnite also has
on mobile devices
where there are already
 hundreds of millions
of Fortnite players.
Developer Mediatonic
is keen to bring the game
to more platforms going
forward.
But considering it's a smaller studio
with far fewer employees,
that may take a while.
