Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is a big success. Publisher Devolver Digital said over the weekend that Fall Guys is its biggest launch ever, and right at this moment it's more popular than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, GTA5, League of Legends, Fortnite, Minecraft, and every other game on Twitch.
But just as with so many other popular online games, success brings headaches in the form of cheaters. Unhappy players have been complaining about cheating on Twitter, Reddit, Steam, and beyond, and as you can see in some of the embedded videos, it looks like it hasn't taken long for misbehavior to find a foothold in this cheerful competition.
Why would you cheat in this game? from r/FallGuysGame
It's not clear what sort of anti-cheat system Fall Guys has, and there may not be one in place at all: The game doesn't have a built-in reporting feature so players who encounter cheaters are encouraged to report them on the Fall Guys Discord. Developers aren't responding to individual messages as far as I can tell (I'm in the "Report Hackers" channel now, and there are a lot of complaints coming in) but Mediatonic is aware of the problems and told Polygon that it hopes to have some sort of fix in place soon.
We're aware of the speedhackers and are working on it 👌Thanks for reporting them!August 9, 2020
Winning matches earns crowns that can be spent on cosmetic items, and we all know how much people love unlocking in-game status symbols. In that light it's arguable that Mediatonic should've been better prepared for this, but then again there's not much of a playbook on anti-cheat for whimsical multiplayer platformers.
For one thing, cosmetics notwithstanding, Fall Guys doesn't strike me as the sort of game that would attract the cheating crowd the way that games like Fortnite or Apex Legends do. It's a cute, goofy party game—the fun is in the bumbling. But even more important, I don't think even the most optimistic among the development team could have reasonably predicted that Fall Guys would achieve this level of popularity so immediately.
I've reached out to Devolver and Mediatonic to ask about a possible timeline on addressing cheats, and will update if I receive a reply.
- Fall Guys server status: How to check
