‘The First Descendant’ Is Now Performing ‘Below Expectations’ For Nexon

I invested a lot in The First Descendant, not so much money, per se, but time, 300 hours in total, as at first, I deemed it a pretty competent and addicting looter shooter. But I walked away eventually, and it seems so did a whole lot of other people to the point where in Nexon’s new quarterly report, they credit lower revenue in part due to a “shortfall” for The First Descendant. Later, they describe it as “below our expectations due to a decline in traffic attributable to lack of fresh content.”

The “traffic shortfall” here is stark. While debuting with an impressive 264,860 peak players on Steam seven months ago, even in that short amount of time, the game has dropped to 11,000 peaks or so nightly, a decline of around 96%. For a single player game that people beat and move on from, that may be understandable. For a live service seasonal game, that’s awful for being just seven months into its lifespan.

As of late, when The First Descendant is in the news, it’s often about its latest batch of bikini skins, or the fact that it’s now added a hot tub in which to use those skins in the game. It promises jiggle physics in the future. All of this caters to a large portion of its playerbase excited about “attractive women” in games that other titles lack, they claim. Sure, you cannot fault them for playing to their base, but a game cannot subsist on a few sought-after skins alone.

The actual problems with The First Descendant were a lack of content as time went on, exhausting grinds and characters that often did not feel worth leveling instead of waiting for eventually-released “Ultimate” versions. Activities were repetitive or uninteresting, new bosses were built around individual characters which was a poor format. Single characters were often far too dominant in many modes (Bunny has been a problem since launch). There are a lot of things.

It’s true that The First Descendant has made strides in areas like drop rates and has plans to make further changes to the game based on what it’s lacking. And the game is not about to be shut down or anything, its team is reportedly scaling up to produce the kind of content it thinks it needs.

But with this severe of a drop in playerbase, it’s unclear what can be done to get players to return en masse. If games like this can recover, it’s usually through some massive 2.0 overhaul or big expansion. As of now, that does not seem to be in the cards.

A 96% loss in seven months for a live game is alarming, even if it may have originally outperformed expectations at launch. The downward trendline would need to be significantly reversed with revenue spiking from in-game purchases at the same time. How and if that can happen is anyone’s guess right now.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.