While there are numerous issues within the gaming space currently that need to be addressed, the overabundance of live-service titles is easily of the biggest woes facing gamers. While the practice isn’t illegal and can be extremely successful when done properly, numerous companies look at the successes that have been had and seek to “make their own” without worrying about quality or whether gamers will like the ideas and practices they put into them. Before its launch, The First Descendant built itself up as a grand-scale FPS with deep stories and characters to choose from. However, fast forward to now, and its player base has dropped tremendously.
As noted by The Gamer, when the game dropped on Steam, it had a peak of 224,000 people playing it. That’s a good number that many would be proud of. However, when they looked at the Steam player count last week, it peaked at just 73,000. That’s a drop of nearly 70%, which no game wants to see just a while after its launch.
The question becomes, “What happened?” The blame mainly falls on developer Nexon, who kept hyping up the title as “something special,” only for it to launch and be found to be “lacking” in various areas. For example, what are the characters we mentioned before? First, they’re not as fun as people hoped them to be. Second, because some of them are “garbage” in the eyes of players, you get sessions where a lot of players are using the same character instead of diversifying!
Third, there are the microtransaction issues, which players have been calling “predatory” since launch. Nexon has tried to fight back against the labeling that has been put on the game, but fans are holding firm. Or, they just leave the game so that they don’t have to deal with it.
When you add all that to how The First Descendant handles its gameplay and the “endless grinding” that some have had to do just to get certain things, you can see why many are put off by the title.
Sadly, this is a recurring thing within the live service games industry. The developers and publishers attempt to make something that’s “big and flashy” and then forget that the point of these games is to KEEP the player base, thus making more money off of them.
While it’s true that 73,000 is still plenty of people to “bank on,” if that number continues to get smaller, the game will be in serious trouble.
