Mediatonic’s latest Season 4.5 update for Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout appears to have accidentally uploaded the game’s source code, which could potentially be targeted by hackers or even competing businesses trying to make knockoffs. The error seems to be linked to a tool used in the Unity game engine during development.
Fall Guys was released in August 2020 and quickly became a hit as a more friendly alternative to battle royale games like PUBG and Fortnite. Players must survive a sequence of Wipeout-style elimination courses instead of gunfights, with the eventual survivor being either the last person standing or the first to cross a finish line, depending on the course.
In March 2021, Epic Games purchased Mediatonic, bringing Fall Guys and Fortnite under the same roof. Fall Guys is currently only available on PC and PlayStation; Xbox and Switch versions would be released later in 2021, perhaps in 2022. The game will have an exclusive mobile port in China.
According to Reddit user darklinkpower, one of the directories in the updated Fall Guys PC release is named “FallGuys_client_BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame.” This reaches 728 items, the majority of which are C++ files and DLL libraries that cover everything from the lobby to anti-cheat programs.
Although the folder name appears to be humorous at first glance, it actually refers to the source of the error: “BackUpThisFolder ButDontShipItWithYourGame” is a name generated by IL2CPP, a Unity tool for translating code to C++. Normally, players are still allowed to view executable files, which is how the game loads.
The mistake would most likely be fixed in a future patch by Mediatonic. The company may or may not be in any additional danger; committed hackers were undoubtedly already able to decompile Fall Guys, and the blunder merely made files more visible. If this is the case, the only possible harm could be the unused capacity on hard drives. Since the game still relies on servers, the software source code can only be used for so much.