Nexon has revealed that they aren’t too happy with the current performance of their online multiplayer shooter, The Finals.
Launched last December 7, 2023, The Finals is a free-to-play shooter with a truly novel idea: It isn’t a battle royale game! Instead, it’s a team based shooter with a genuinely original VR combat game show premise, and highly refined mechanics.
Adding to the game’s complexity is the ability to destroy everything in the environment, and the conceit that gamers have to collect cash, and then deposit them, lest they get killed in-game and their money is stolen from them. But even without that taken into account, players can easily get overwhelmed with its highly refined shooter gameplay systems. Novices may not even notice this, but more advanced players could spend hours studying and mastering them.
As recorded on SteamDB, The Finals reached a Steam concurrent player peak of 242,619 players, but its numbers now fall upon the tens of thousands of players, and that number is getting lower. Many fans have put forward multiple theories for the declining numbers, but it’s clear that its publisher Nexon is needing answers more than anyone else.
As reported on Insider Gaming, Nexon reported that The Finals was not meeting their very specific, metric driven expectations. In their own words:
“The launch of Season 2 in March created a short-lived increase in player metrics but delivered lower-than-expected retention and revenue. The Embark team is working with our Korea-based Live Operations team to understand and address the key issues.”
This is a good time to point out that The Finals was published by Korean gaming conglomerate Nexon, but developed by Sweden based Embark Studios. Embark is made up of many veteran game developers, who worked on titles like Battlefield. Nexon themselves specialize in the free-to-play business model, as one of the major local video game publishers in Korea.
Nexon also revealed that they saw better performance from their local hit, MapleStory, and their clearly-not-an-independent title, Dave the Diver. But The Finals ‘ performance was so bad that it actually offset those positive metrics.
It may seem like a lifetime ago, but this was the same Nexon that once aimed for the moon when they published Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – First Assault Online in 2017. Nexon is certainly not the first Korean video game company to try to break through to the West. However, the stakes for success are higher now, as their local industry has become saturated to the point that they need to find opportunities elsewhere.
So Nexon will definitely be working on The Finals with Embark Studios, to make it a real success that will literally pay off for them.
