Bilibili is bringing Fall Guys to China as a mobile game following the battle royale’s success on PC and PS4
- Fall Guys, from British studio Mediatonic, has become a summer sensation after launching in August
- Chinese game companies like Tencent are known for bringing mobile versions of hit PC and console games to consumers
Fall Guys is officially coming to smartphones … in China.
Chinese online video giant Bilibili recently announced that it’s bringing a mobile version of the global breakout hit to its home market. The game is currently available for preregistration on Bilibili’s game platform. As of Monday morning, more than 130,000 users have expressed interests.
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Bilibili says it will be the Fall Guys mobile publisher in China, but there’s no news yet about the mobile version in other countries. Bilibili also hasn’t given a release date for the game.
The announcement was made just a couple days before the game’s developer, London-based Mediatonic, warned players that ads for a mobile version of Fall Guys were scams. On Monday, the company confirmed Bilibili’s announcement but it seemed to suggest that Mediatonic itself isn’t working on a mobile version right now.
“We can confirm Bilibili have secured publishing rights to a mobile version in China,” said Paul Croft, co-founder of Mediatonic.
“As you can imagine, we‘ve had a lot of questions about platforms since launch, and of course we’d love to release on more platforms in the future but for now we’re focusing our efforts on PC and PS4”
Fall Guys has quickly become a summer sensation since launching on PC and Sony’s PlayStation 4 this month. Within 24 hours, more than 1.5 million players had played the game, Mediatonic tweeted at the time.
The game builds on the battle royale format made popular by blockbusters like PUBG and Fortnite, pitting 60 jelly bean characters against each other. But instead of wielding weapons and trying to kill each other, the anthropomorphic beans compete in a mad dash through obstacles like giant falling bananas. Players go through several elimination rounds until one of them emerges as the final winner.
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Bilibili is already a content partner for Fall Guys in China, where the company hosts one of the country’s biggest video streaming platforms.
With Fall Guys, Bilibili follows a well-trodden path of Chinese companies bringing PC and console hits to gamers in mobile form.
In 2018, Tencent introduced PUBG Mobile to the world a year after South Korea’s Bluehole Studio released the original PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. The next year, the Chinese giant released Call of Duty: Mobile under a license from Activision-Blizzard, which owns the long-running franchise.
While Tencent developed both of those mobile games itself, there’s no indication that Bilibili is involved in the development of the Fall Guys mobile game.
Bilibili also hasn’t said whether the mobile version will be free to play, like other hit mobile games in China that use in-game purchases for monetisation. When asked, a Bilibili representative said the company will share more details as soon as they have them.
