There is one “curse” associated with the South Korean company NEXON: most of the new games show high online at the start, but after a year they are on the verge of closure. Over the past year, several projects of this company have been closed: the global version of the cross-platform MMORPG V4, the team action game Warhaven, the mobile action game Building & Fighter, the isometric action-RPG Night Walker. And such projects as THE FINALS, HIT 2, Wars of Prasia, DNF Duel have lost their initial audience and show rather modest results both in terms of online and profit. The once-awaited looter shooter The First Descendant also did not escape this curse.
In the first week after the game’s release, peak online numbers exceeded 260 thousand players on the Steam platform alone, and according to the developers, more people played on consoles than on PCs. In just seven days, more than 10 million users became familiar with the game, which is a good indicator for such a game. All these successes were against the backdrop of problems with the servers and the stability of the game itself. At the time, there were suggestions that the numbers could have been higher if not for technical errors.
The authors hoped that as all negative situations were resolved and new content was added, players would spend more time in the game. However, the situation turned out completely in the opposite direction: a week after the release, online began to gradually decline, and only occasionally there was a slight increase in the game’s audience. As a result, four months after the release, the peak daily online on Steam does not exceed 20 thousand players.
It can take a long time to figure out why the potential audience didn’t like the game and why it only has 54% positive reviews on Steam. However, among the first complaints there will probably be a lack of variety in high-end content, tedious farming of many different materials, the need to wait several hours for the creation of Descendants and equipment items, the quality of artificial intelligence of enemies and technical problems that still haunt some players.
Even before the game’s release, in numerous interviews and presentations, development managers stated that they planned to develop the game for many years, and over time, new content would appear in the game, which would keep players interested. There were great expectations from the first season, which started on August 29 and did not in any way affect the number of players, but only received a lot of negative reviews on Steam.
The second content update within the first season will be released on October 10. However, given all the problems in the game, there is less and less confidence that it will have an impact on players returning to the game. And simply adding a new boss, character and a couple of sexy costumes to the game will not bring players back for more than a couple of evenings. Without any significant improvements, the game will be forgotten by next summer.