The First Descendant Has ‘No Staying Power’, Says Nexon

The First Descendant hasn’t even been on the market for two years, and the game’s developer and publisher, Nexon, seems ready to write it off. In a recent financial update, Nexon’s CEO, Junghun Lee, suggested that while The First Descendant did well at launch in July 2024, it quickly fell out of favor with gamers worldwide.

He suggested that ‘structural changes’ would be needed to fix The First Descendant, as what’s wrong with the game goes beyond a simple ‘patch’.

The First Descendant Seems Ready to Collapse

The First Descendant is a third-person looter shooter that relied on pleasing the ‘gooner gamer’ crowd since the moment it hit the market. It’s a divisive title that’s firmly in the middle of the road when it comes to reviews, both from critics and from the average gaming audience.

On Steam, it boasts a mixed rating from 110,000 reviews, and on Metacritic, it has a score of around 57, with a user score of 6.2. It’s not winning any awards with numbers like that, but once upon a time, it was pretty popular.

Taking Steam as the example again, The First Descendant managed to secure an all-time high peak player count of 264,000 users, which isn’t something to scoff at. However, at the time of publishing, the game was floating at around 5,000 peak users per day at best.

On Twitch, it managed to pick up 160,000 concurrent viewers at launch, but at the time of writing, just 200 people were watching the game.

In the recent financial document, Nexon’s CEO and President declared that the game has no staying power. He directly said it’s something that ‘didn’t work’:

Let me start with an assessment of what didn’t work.

Dungeon&Fighter Mobile launched with terrific momentum in 2024, then lost its way. The retention mechanics weren’t strong enough to hold players longterm.

Same issue with The First Descendant: Strong launch, no staying power. These are design issues that are not fixed with a patch – they require structural changes to game mechanics.

For a while, The First Descendant found fame on account of Nexon adding some audacious and hyper-revealing outfits, which proved to be scandalous at best. It was all very short-lived, and even the skimpiest outfit was incapable of retaining too many players.

Do you still enjoy The First Descendant? Let us know why on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that NAKWON is coming out in 2027

Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You’ll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.

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