[2021] A Discussion on Fall Guys Contests

Here's the limitations that we were trying to work-around:

- We only are able to give around 100 costumes out because it is a manual process and takes a bunch of time for support to gift them out.

- We only wanted around 100 entries so that it wasn't too much work to go through and validate them

- We have no coding resources to add/modify/change the game in order to run the contest

- It needs to be something that is possible to record yourself doing

If you can think of other competitions that fit these requirements, please let us know, it's harder than it sounds.

Yes it was a very hard (almost impossible challenge) but that was the point. We made it easier when we realised JUST how hard it was, but if we'd made it too easy to start with, we couldn't have made it harder half way through.

Imagine if 4,000 people would have entered. It would have taken us weeks to get through all the entries and then to gift out all of the costumes.

We'd LOVE to do in-game costumes too, or many of the things people suggest, but there are restraints that we're trying to work around.

We were sad to see someone using custom lobbies to exploit this so we've brought a rule in for future competitions - no custom lobbies. We should have said that to begin with, but we didn't think streamers would try and do that.

We also reached out to the streamer you've linked and said that they can't trade in-game items for subscriptions in future.

Please can you explain this a bit further:

" Fall Guys continuously puts all their efforts into boosting their streamers (some of which barely play the game anymore), while simultaneously neglecting their player base "

How are we neglecting our player base?

This isn't really linked to this contest, but since you have brought it up within your thread:

We send exclusives to streamers because they are doing us a massive favour by playing the game and promoting it to their audiences. It's marketing. All games do it. Other games will just straight up pay streamers. Some games give them a cut of sales from in-game purchases. We just give them costumes that have no real-money value.

Just thinking of some other big games - Cyberpunk, literally put streamers in the game as characters... Fortnite has creator codes so streamers can earn money playing the game and puts them in as characters. I struggle to think of a recent game that hasn't had some sort of program or initiative with influencers/streamers.

I just honestly really didn't think the streamers would feel invested in the competition enough to spend hours trying to beat it, especially when I've been so freely giving them costumes.

Obviously, I was mistaken. Lesson learned though and we've brought in rules for next time.

I don't get the connection between me gifting out promotional costumes to streamers and us "neglecting our player base"

Giving costumes to streamers doesn't "harm" our player base.

Streamers do a lot of marketing for the game... Which brings in more players... Which benefits our player base.

If you genuinely want to learn more about it, you can search influencer marketing.

It's why streamers got special free PS5's and Xbox One's with engravings...

Did that push people away from buying the consoles? No.

Okay, I accept you feel this way.

It's different for games as a live service. Look at Fornite adding in influencer costumes for example.

We knew there was a possibility for streamers to exploit private lobbies, we just didn't think they would. That was a mistake.

We also knew it was very unlikely for Bert to survive Perfect Match, but it was supposed to be really difficult. We made it too difficult so we switched up the rules and extended it.

That was me! I'm checking through the submissions - I've checked the first 118 so far and only 4 made the 2/3 Pegwins that we need, but those are all from the first 23 hours of the competition. We had 330 responses in total, and I expect that a lot more in that last day will qualify.
My hope is that 100 people managed to do it correctly, so then we can give the costume to everyone who did, but currently it's hard to say.

Hi! Well done for getting Tundra Run and Fall Ball! It's me that is going through all the submissions, so I'll just explain the current status.
We had around 330 submissions total, and I've been through 118 so far and 4 of them have got 2/3. Those are all from the first 23 hours, before anyone knew that 2/3 would qualify, so I'd expect that far more of those last 200 submissions will have made it. I also believe anyone who did it absolutely deserves the costume, it's simply down to limitation of resources.
That said, if we do get slightly over 100 qualifying submissions, we will extend the amount slightly. I can't say how many I expect to have done it, your guess is as good as mine at this point, but I am really hoping that around 100 did it correctly so that everyone can get the costume.
Also, just to clarify - you won't know if you've got it until you just check your inventory. Unfortunately we don't have in-game messaging to let you know, and I didn't want to take personal details in the form. I'm hoping to get the checking of the submissions finished today or tomorrow, but it'll take a while to get all the costumes gifted to people so I can't give you an ETA on when to check your inventory, but I'm hoping by the end of the week.

Hi! It's me that's going through the submissions and I really wish that was the case (and tbh I think that's how I thought it would be before I actually started looking through them). I spent yesterday going through 118 out of the 330 submissions and only 4 were correct. It seems we underestimated how many people would send in three uncut videos of them playing Tundra Run, Fall Ball and Perfect Match in which they either dropped Pegwin or didn't even see him; three failed attempts at one level; or one failed attempt at Tundra Run, a handwritten letter and a video of them emoting on Fortnite.

Totally agree, it was a big mistake on our part including them in the Season 2 trailer that we've been doing everything we can to prevent from happening in the future.

All DLC costumes have a variant colour that won't be in the store. Since the Season 2 mess up, I think we've done pretty well at keeping them out of trailers. A lot of the time our gameplay trailer footage is taken in our playtests, at which point we usually don't know which costume out of the two colour options will be in the DLC. During the playtests, we have most costumes available to use so it's a little tricky to make sure 100% that they don't make it in, but so far I think we've done pretty well at keeping them out. We'll continue to do everything we can to prevent them from being in promotional material.

It's our fault for not making it a rule, we've learned from it, and next time we'll have some more rules in place.

It sounds like you have an issue with Influencer Marketing - I'm really sorry to say but this is SUPER common. It's actually more uncommon for a game to do no Influencer Marketing at all now. I don't want to argue the pros/cons of it since it's an industry-wide thing. Actually, it's not even the games industry. Every industry.

Finally got through all the submissions yesterday and the costumes were sent out this morning. Out of 329 submissions, 46 people qualified to get one (of which 3 people got 3/3, and 43 people got 2/3) so well done if you did! It'll be in your inventory now if you did it.