Embark Studios released The Finals late last year, a fast-paced first-person-shooter that takes elements from hero shooters and conventional shooters and makes something fairly different. That, coupled with the quality, was enough to give The Finals a significant number of players very quickly. Even though the game reached almost 250k players on Steam alone, it seems that wasn’t enough, or at least, the developers were expecting more. Nexon expected The Finals to blow up, and become a major franchise with a long-term following, especially with season 2.
The free-to-play shooter has fallen short of the publisher’s expectations by failing to hit internally set targets for player engagement. The developers are now trying to figure out why that is, and possibly turn to the community and fix The Finals’ shortcomings.
Nexon Unhappy With the Number of Players in the Finals After Season 2
Nexon published a financial letter recently that explained that at the start of season 2 of The Finals in March, the bump in players wasn’t a big one, and to make matters worse, it was for a small period. That means lower retention and revenue than expected for such a major update.
Embark Studios is working with a Korean Live Operations team to identify the problems and possibly rectify them. Nexon is still in a good position because, according to the company, the loss of players in The Finals was covered by better performance by other games from the publisher. One of those successes is Dave the Diver.
On the bright side, Nexon is still happy that the core playerbase has remained consistent, and is still pulling good monthly active users compared to last year. Being a free-to-play game, it has a low barrier to entry, so a lot of people were bound to give it a shot and drop it after a while. But even with that, and the cheating sprees, players have stuck around.
Nexon and Embark Studios will hopefully execute their plans with season 3 of The Finals, which will come out in June.
