The First Descendant Loses 40 Percent of Players in First Month

Upon its release earlier this month, free-to-play looter shooter The First Descendant saw massive engagement, pulling in over 260,000 concurrent players on Steam and hitting 10 million players across all platforms. However, plagiarism allegations, launch issues, and microtransaction woes have seemed to cripple the once-popular Nexon title, which has seen its playerbase fall by around 40 percent since July 2.

While this is a steep drop, it still places the title in continued competition with other similar titles like Warframe, which sees an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 concurrent players each day.

In an interview with God is a Geek earlier this month, the game’s producer Lee Beom-jun and director Min Seok Joo chatted about what’s coming in the future, and why players should stick around.

“The First Descendant revolves around collecting weapons, modules, external components, and reactors to create builds. We’ve designed skill modification modules and ultimate modules to allow for a variety of builds to be explored. Updates are also heavily focused on improving and expanding builds. Each season, we release new ultimate weapons, modules, and external components. All this content will provide players with opportunities to adjust and refine their builds,” the pair explained.

As is the case with many free-to-play live-service games, The First Descendant utilizes microtransactions. However, many players have called out the game’s exorbitant pricing, with one character’s ‘ultimate bundle’ costing around $100 and color schemes being single-use.

The First Descendant was released on July 2 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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