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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

The First Descendant team Nexon has branded its saucy live-service title a failure less than two years after its PC, Xbox, PlayStation release.

A capital markets briefing from the developer earlier this week had the game appear in a presentational slide headlined "What Did Not Work". The First Descendant appears on the page in a table, pointing to the "retention challenges" it had.

Company president and CEO Junghun Lee then puts it this way: "Strong launch, no staying power." He added the game faced the same issues as Dungeon & Fighter Mobile, another title in the developer's portfolio. "The retention mechanics weren't strong enough to hold players long-term."

"These are design issues that are not fixed with a patch — they require structural changes to game mechanics."

Concurrent player data from SteamDB reveals that, on PC at least, The First Descendant opened strongly with a peak of over 264,000 users around launch. Player interest, as Lee noted, very quickly tailed off, however. Three months after release, the PC version was peaking at around 25,000 concurrent players. Now, in 2026, The First Descendant generally pulls anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 players at peak times.

More at the link:

'Did Not Work': The First Descendant Considered a Failure by Its Developer

"Strong launch, no staying power"

www.pushsquare.com

 

[Cert.in.Death]

It worked for me (っ´ཀ`)っ

 

[kpopSuperstar]

If not for the gooning it would have had a soft launch as well.

 

[sodstall]

I enjoyed my time with it but the structure and story got really tedious at one point. Was really enjoying the destiny 2-like class building but the story really couldn't anchor the experience with how scattered all the story content felt. Will never understand how warframe does it to this day.

 

[lughnasadh123]

Need something more substantial than tiddies next time. Rest of the game got really boring, really quick.

 

[Generic]

I remember when youtubers acted like if this game was the AAAA killer.

 

[KanKamAndNob]

That's too bad. Hopefully they learn from their mistakes. Simple: keep the sexy waifus, improve the gameplay, and don't have the monetization be some of the worse in GAAS titles.

I still think that both this game and Mecha Break should have been single player titles.

 

[Moondoggy]

Legacy gaming media isn't hesitating to point out when this live service game is considered a failure, but shilled into overdrive trying to convince people Concord was doing well and definitely worth playing, I wonder why that is.

 

[The_Mike]

Game could've been a strong Warframe competitor but the game was super shallow with little to no content.

 

[kunonabi]

The grapple felt awful and it was too confusing how to do all the stuff around town. It was also going to take forever to play the character I wanted without paying a stupid amount of money so I just bailed. I did like the abilities and what I saw of the story but it was just too much of a chore to actually play.

 

[Fbh]

Tits will draw people in, but your game needs to offer something more substantial for them to say.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

too little content and too much grinding, it's not rocket science just greed, making everything you want really hard to get to push you into spending, but then everything is priced really high because they want to extract as much money as possible from whales.
this while there's a thousand and one other games fighting for your attention with their own brands of fomo events and passes, of course retention plummets hard.