Thu. Jan 23rd, 2025
First Descendant

Why The First Descendant Suffers From Great Decline In Players

First Descendant

While eight months is a long time to go, in an industry where it seems every game on the shelf wants your attention with some sort of “live service,” only so many manage the kind of prolonged buzz and play library that can keep people coming back.

Unfortunately, The First Descendant is now far from the promising first-person shooter with fleshed-out narratives and minorities that were boasted…. as it turns out they are pretty damn boring. While it started strong, the game has lost its footing in recent months and players have dropped off shortly after launch.

Crash from a Promising Introduction

Released on Steam, it pulled in an unassailable audience of 224,000 players at launch—a peak even many AAA games would fall short of achieving. Unfortunately, this success has been fleeting. Recently, fewer than 73k players played the game at once; this constitutes a decrease of more than ~70% according to The Gamer. The rapidity and severity of the drop within about 6 months is alarming, to say the least.

Read Also: X|S: The forecast for a sales showdown in the United States is that it will be in June 2024.

What Went Wrong?

The GID key to the decay of this current is set for the most part on Nexon, who created and keeps up BnS. The First Descendant was marketed heavily as a unique and immersive experience prior to its release, but players discovered all too quickly that it fell short in some key areas.

Among them, the characters themselves are among the most important criticismOriginaly they were supposed to be Ubisoft’s biggest draw. Instead, most players to pay picks come off as boring at best rather than wide-ranging and engaging. This makes some characters useless enough that most players can choose only a handful of options to get through a game, which results in monotony where everyone is one from ten percent heroes.

A bigger problem is the game’s use of in-game purchases. These in-game purchases were widely slammed by players as “predatory” that encouraged them to pay if they wished to build their characters and fully appreciate the game. Nexon has made efforts to amend these complaints, but the game’s reputation may already be tarnished. This has caused some to stop playing the game out of pure frustration with these microtransactions.

On top of this, the gameplay itself has led some to characterize it as an “endless grind. A lot of people have taken issue with how repetitive the game is, even going so far as to say that it feels like this “free” doesn’t offer quite enough for free and that if you do not take advantage of microtransactions there isn´t a whole point.

First Descendant

Protobuffalo: A Wider Problem in Live-Service Games

The First Descendant is just the latest in a string of downfalls within live service games. Unfortunately, all too often developers and publishers are so concerned with launching new games with big graphics that they spend a fortune on marketing to gamers without also ensuring it offers players the value retention required for repeating engagement.

This is the product of a flashy initial success that burns brightly as players flock to take part but disappear just as fast due to player dis-satisfaction with both the game itself and its business practices.

72,300 are still playing The First Descendant — a big number in non-VR terms to lose but the pattern is worrying. If the underlying issues do not be fixed by Nexon, it will continue to decrease and the game will be in danger.

The Road Ahead

If The First Descendant is to turn things around, Nexon will have a lot of work ahead in terms of both balancing gameplay and the microtransaction model. You can not easily regrow the trust of a player that has been lost, but there is an opportunity to correct your course here.

The failure of The First Descendant — a cautionary taleAs any Ugandan can imagine, it is very important to sustain your player base in an industry where you are fighting for attention but the story of ‘The First Descendant’ and other games within this long dream (read: nightmare) only go so far. We will have to wait and see if the game can recover, or if it is yet another live-service title that ends up less than what we all had hoped.

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