Summary
Despite entering one of the most over-saturated markets in video games, the free-to-play hero shooter market,Fragpunkenjoyed an impressive start to life. Released on March 6, the title quickly stormed to apeak concurrent player countof 113,243, making it one of the biggest launches of 2025 so far.
But, while it drew lots of players, they weren’t necessarily always loving the game, with complaints about bot lobbies running rampant within the first few days of launch.
FragPunk Is Seemingly Already Plagued With Bot Lobbies, And Players Aren’t Happy
Bot lobbies are nothing new in games, but they’re generally never popular. This year alone, Marvel Rivals wasslammed for including matches that had tons of bots, Dead by Daylight was forced toremove bots from 2v8 matches due to player complaints, and Fortnite accidentally took things to the extreme,filling matches with 90 percent AI-controlled players. Fragpunk has now joined this list.
While the Fragpunksubredditis in its infancy,dozens of complaintscropped up over the weekend about matches that are filled with bots.
In one thread, one unhappy playersaid, “It’s no fun being in ranked games with bots on both teams. I just played a game where one of the bots was repeatedly getting stuck in one corner of the map. Watching the kill cams or spectating ‘teammates’ makes it painfully obvious, too.”
In response, another player, rulerdude,said, “There also needs to be an opt-out for bots in casual. If I wanna play against bots, I’ll play in the practice mode.” They added, “Playing against bots because matchmaking is taking too long is one thing, but being forced into bot lobbies as a ‘pity match’ is so annoying.”
If I wanna play against bots, I’ll play in the practice mode.
The issue is clearly a prevalent one. Although the game has now moved to “Mostly Positive” reviews on Steam thanks to a push for more positive reviews from the subreddit, Fragpunk launched with “Mixed” reviews, with players citing bot lobbies as one of the biggest problems they’ve faced so far.
The game is obviously new, so Bad Guitar Studio has a lot of time to fix things, but the studio will want to do it as soon as possible to avoid losing players as quickly as it drew them in,like some recent games have.
