Live Looter ‘The First Descendant’ Has Lost 96% Of Its Playerbase In Six Months

When I wrote an article this week about the slow death of the live looter shooter genre, one recent game actually slipped my mind, despite the fact that I’d previously put 300 hours into it, The First Descendant.

The First Descendant is very much a PvE looter shooter, and arrived with solid numbers and a decently robust fanbase. Though the narrative about the game got sidetracked by culture war debates about character hotness, I previously said that at least at launch, as a genre veteran I found that it was in fact a compellingly-structured shooter with decent reward loops and clear objectives to maintain.

Fast-forward to six months later and…things are not quite where they were. And a lot of that comes from improvements the game could have made that it did not, and the structure of the entire seasonal model.

The result? Since its launch in July six months ago, The First Descendant has gone from an initial peak of 264,860 players to a current peak on Steam of 9,781. That’s a loss of 96.4% of its initial playerbase.

There are always some debates about declining player numbers in games and whether they matter, but The First Descendant is in the aforementioned live looter category that is very much trying to maintain its playerbase through ongoing updates and additions through a seasonal model. That does not appear to be going very well. The arrival of seasons or bigger updates are represented as small blips on the chart, but at this point we’re talking about a change like going from 12,000 players to 26,000 players for 2-3 weeks or so. And it keeps hitting record lows.

Why is this happening? No, I will still not say I think The First Descendant is a bad game. There really was something there, but things have not evolved as much as they’ve needed to and the entire seasonal structure hasn’t really worked. Why?

The game has not figured out how to properly bolster its reward loop to be less punishing with sometimes pitiful drop rates, and past that, how to upgrade these consistently new characters every season who start at zero and require a colossal amount of investment to get them to the level of your existing powerful heroes.

There’s also the fundamental question of…why? If I spent 50 hours farming for an maxing Ultimate Viessa, why am I going to grind out new ice hero Hailey? The game tried to solve for this by adding new mega-bosses that often have mechanics geared toward the new characters specifically, but that was frustrating more than useful. Some games have figured this out like Genshin Impact, The First Descendant has not.

I do not know what the last few months of the game have brought as I gave up some time during season 1, despite all my playtime before that. I’m not saying that The First Descendant is dead, but this is not the kind of playerbase you want to see for a live shooter you’re constantly cranking out content for, and without some sort of huge expansion on the horizon to bring players back, this feels like another cautionary tale of how hard it is to make a successful live looter in this day and age.

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