The Finals, the fast-paced free-to-play shooter shadow dropped back in December, initially drew huge crowds, but retention has waned. Publisher Nexon just reported substantial revenues across the board, partially offset by the "lower-than-expected" performance of the live service punt.
In Nexon's Q1 2024 earnings letter (thanks, Insider Gaming), the company repeatedly points to The Finals performance as a problem, allowing that the title did help push consolidated MAUs up. The publisher notes that the launch of Season 2 in March "created a short-lived increase in player metrics" but ultimately failed to hit internal retention and revenue milestones. It notes that developer Embark is working with the company's Korea-based Live Operations team to "understand and address the key issues" that led to the game's underwhelming performance.
The firm expects growth from the game and notes that Season 3 will go live in June. Initially scoring praise from fans and critics, The Finals quickly developed a cheating problem, which Embark has been battling to combat ever since.
Have you checked in on The Finals recently? Can the game find a large enough audience in an increasingly competitive industry? Secure the bag in the comments section below.
[source pdf.irpocket.com, via insider-gaming.com]
Comments 31
people are not leaving the live service games they already play to switch over to a new one
The handful of games early to the party these newcomers are trying to join just have too big a grip on the playerbase.
That plus the fad has dipped, people are growing tired of season pass fomo and its about time.
Its been a poison on the industry.
@trev666 Yeah, it's this in my opinion. The Finals may be a great game, but it's almost impossible to get people off Fortnite, Genshin, etc.
I played the finals over a month and it was great fun with friends but rampant cheating and serious lack of content turned me away and I have not had the desire to return. The game is not bad by any stretch it just lacks that grab factor that other games provide.
Yeah there is definitely some competion in the live service space today which I guess makes it harder for new games to compete.
As always many companies want to do live service games for the fast and continous stream of income but never tackle cheaters and support their game monthly.
I tried to get into The Finals, but to me it lacked some of the sheer complexity of other live service games. In Overwatch there's always a new character to learn, a new way of holding off an ability until another ability has been used.
The gap between where you are and the top is full of obvious steps, and some of them are just chunks of knowledge, not 'reflexes' or 'aim'.
The finals felt too short, too ephemeral. One round plays a lot like another round, any one moment is a lot like another moment.
@get2sammyb That‘s why I don’t get Sony‘s strategy: The market for life service games is limited, and these players have only a limited amount of time. If Sony publishs 9 LSGs, then these will cannibalise each other, like Helldivers 2 did with The Finales. Meanwhile Fortnite players will stick to their stuff, as players of World of Warcraft, Counter Strike etc. did and do.
The lack of content turned me away from this game, I played it a lot at launch for a few weeks, but it became boring quite fast.
The same problem happened for Splitgate, these two games became so popular on release, but they both dropped down way too fast.
And I am one of those people that still stick to Fornite even after 6,5 years of playing it, and why? Because it constantly gets new content.
I saw this coming, I played 10 matches and was bored, there's not enough vatriey in the game to keep people interested.
@trev666 they're currently paying some consultant firm thousands of dollars to tell them that, and you're out here giving the info out for free!
I played The Finals and really enjoyed it for an evening and then never wanted to pick it up again.
The AI commentators were a part of that as was the polished but limited gameplay loop.
I never even heard of this...
I played it for a few months, and really enjoyed it. I then took a break and came back to it - and something had changed. In the beginning I was winning approx 75% of my games, on my return it was more like 25% - something just felt off. Anyway, haven't played it in months now.
@Max_the_German Sadly they only need one hit and they get to print money. It seems like Sony is determined to take as many bites of the apple as it takes to to find that one title that breaks through. Helldivers 2 managed to leverage itself a player base, despite a saturated market, but it's monetisation is terrible. Sadly I think it will only embolden Sony to keep chasing the live service unicorn.
Maybe because the majority of the streamers who were used to promote this moved on to the next big thing they were promoting (whether its Grey Zone, Arena, Marvel Rivals, DefiantX etc).
These games maybe 'fun' with the right friends for an hour or two, but the lack of depth, doing the same thing match after match isn't good for longevity. As more and more 'struggle' to establish and compete with Fortnite, Apex, Warzone etc, the more difficult I think it will be for 'new' games as people will be reluctant to play something they fear will be shuttered in a few years...
@trev666 Exactly this. There are too many live service games that are meant to be played forever. Single player games don’t have this problem since you beat the campaign, maybe do some side or post game content, then move onto the next game.
Some can be successful like Helldivers, but they’re very few and between these days since the live service space is so oversaurated.
Played almost 400 hours since PC beta and now playing on PS5, I love the finals, they've done well balancing the abilities, guns, gadgets ect. Like people have said above people stick to what they've already put time and effort into and don't really change. I've tried this with my nephews to get them into new game and although they enjoy it they always seems to go back to Fortnite or Roblox. The people like me who do give alot of games a chance and switch are going to switch again when other stuff comes out.
Edit: Just to add the reason some of player base maybe leaving is not because they're not adding content, they do. It's because the stuff they're adding is awful. The new map is bland and lazy, the new guns are terrible and the abilities they've added are OK but again not great. So despite adding content it's been really poor content they have added.
The game is pretty fun, but, at the end of the day, trying to “get the band together,” so to speak, is harder now than it used to be, and it doesn’t help that there’s too many live service options now. As a result, The Finals was tried, enjoyed, and moved on with after maybe three or four sessions onto the next one, which I think was Foamstars, and then Helldivers, and now waiting for probably XDefiant, but that one had a similar thing to games like Splitgate and Overwatch 2 before it. The whole live service thing peaked about a year after the release of Warzone and has been on a very steady decline since then. I think most gamers have their “one” live service game, ala Destiny 2, Warzone, Apex, Fortnite, GTA, the various survival games, etc. and it’s become near impossible to crack that at this point. I mean, my wife will go into phases of religiously playing Splatoon, for instance. She tried Foamstars, and said, “Nope, Splatoon only,” and that was that. I think that’s emblematic for that side of gaming. For me, I know I’m long gone from having that “one,” given that Halo Infinite and Overwatch 2 didn’t stick the landing, and Destiny 2 and Warzone got too meta for fun. I’m the rare instance of someone that’s looking for a live service game to play casually, but the way live service games are set up now sort of… actively push me away in their grindy gatcha mentality, and yet also push my friends away because they can’t sustain a player count for long. I miss the good old days of leveling up in Halo where it was simple and fun and didn’t need skins of Goku and Peter Griffin and Ariana Grande.
I played it and really didn't get the hype. Lots of people were singing it's praises though but it's a crowded market to break into. Why would anyone choose this game over any other? For a couple of weekends while the game is hot, sure, but what's there to keep them coming back? They were naive if they thought they wouldn't have to do something special to maintain people's interest over established titles and the next new game.
@Max_the_German "If Sony publishs 9 LSGs, then these will cannibalise each other, like Helldivers 2 did with The Finals"
Not necessarily. The hope is for at least one of them to succeed and one did succeed (Helldivers), becoming the fastest selling game Sony has ever published. Despite the doubters, it proved to be a good bet in the end.
The finals is a great game and definitely scratches that BF itch I had BUT it's no BF with the large maps and anything can go like BF 3 &4 have plus I'm finding any new F2P shooter better than apex legends to me
Disrupting the established live service games takes some doing. In recent times only Helldivers 2 has managed to do that as far as I can tell. It's bringing something new to the table with third person co-op plus the devs made the most fun multiplayer game in a long long time in my opinion. To be fair I'm more of a single player gamer and fell off Fortnite after a week although I put several years into Warzone. The market is saturated at this point so introducing something new is very risky indeed.
The game is quite punishing for new players and I can certainly understand why some can’t click with the game. I play it daily, I enjoy the game but I can understand why my friend doesn’t want to pursue putting in the hours to get the game to click for him.
The class system is in my opinion broken. One class dominates (light class) over the other two and it still hasn’t been rectified. How can the light class have an invisibility skill along with sniping weapons and also have thermal vision options whilst the other two classes have grenade like scanners that can easily be spotted and avoided by the other team? It’s ridiculous when you can run around the Heavy class players and they can’t do anything because their turn circle is too slow to have the cross hair on the target. You have no chance as a Heavy if some light class player is running around you close up with a gun that fires out bullets faster than yours.
The newer maps since the initial buzz have been really poor. Very flat and lacking the verticality that the Monaco and Seoul maps have. The Vegas one sucked a lot of fun out of playing the game as it’s just big open rooms lacking the choices of quick escapes from fighting that Monaco has. This seasons new map is no better, it’s quite frankly dull. This spoon feeding of new maps we’re getting from studios is really having an effect on player bases because if the map is not great you’re going to quickly lose the interest of people coming back to a game after being away from it for a period of time. I miss the days of map packs when you could be guaranteed that there would be at least one map out of say four that was great. Season passes don’t offer enough, it’s incentive benefits corporate interests because it offers very little in terms of value.
Never would have touched it anyway because of the use of AI.
I simply thought it was boring and frustrating. It immediately had an annoying meta and the highly-touted destruction mechanics were buggy and did way less to impact the matches than I anticipated. Mostly, they just annoyed me when they didn't work properly and I'd have debris blocking my path or that I couldn't climb over swiftly enough.
It would rapidly swing from slow and cumbersome to so friggin' fast it made me head spin. Like it could channel Siege or Counterstrike at one moment and then Unreal Tournament the next. It felt like it didn't know what kind of shooter it wanted to be.
The fact it had no system to fill in lost allies in a match (I dunno if they ever addressed that) was also idiotic. The moment you were down a player, you knew your chances of winning were basically nil. So why bother trying? It was easier to quit because a full team steamrolled in ways that other shooters don't necessarily allow (it's far simpler to 1-man a full squad in Fortnite than it was for a team of 2 to take out a team of 3 in this, somehow).
The base gameplay was okay, at best. But the gimmick ended up being just that: too gimmicky.
I also don't think it had NEARLY enough content at launch. It got too old far too fast.
This will happen to defiant as well. People don't want more fps live service schemes.
It was a huge mistake for Ubisoft to cancel a third person survival action shooter. There is a demand for more non first person games like these Ala hell divers.
These fps ones just won't break through, it's too late for that.
I demand an investigation into why they thought this game was going to perform well!
boring game pretty much
Not every game can be Fortnite - there's just not enough room.
You're fighting for attention with:
Not to mention other non-"entertainment" things like work, school, or even just nicer weather outside as we get into spring and summer
How well do you expect your game to do?
Especially the F2P games that depend on constant engagement and buying DLC - the few with staying power rake in billions and make all the other studios turn green with envy, but most games won't come near that (and most who come close won't sustain it). If it was that easy to become the next Fortnite, Fortnite would have died by now.
@ThomasHL can't disagree more.
I've always been a single player guy (I only started dabbling in online multiplayer here and there in the last couple of years), but after trying out the beta I was hooked, and The Finals is basically the only game I've played since it launched.
And let me tell you, in this six months I've only scratched the surface of the complexity behind it.
The sheer amount of possible combinations of classes, specializations and gadgets, coupled with the destructibility of the environments, make it deeply strategic on a moment to moment basis.
Sure, it's probably way more chaotic and less predictable than other games without the same distractibility, but it doesn't make it any less deep or strategic.
But hey, if you don't like it that's perfectly fine, no game is for everyone
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