Popular Shooter The Finals Plummets
The large exodus of players is increasingly beginning to overshadow the huge success of the free-to-play shooter from veterans of the Battlefield series. The hit FPS The Finals is losing popularity at a dizzying rate.
The industry was quite surprised by the great success of the online FPS from veterans of the Battlefield series. The shooter from Embark Studios developers took Steam by storm on its launch day. The popularity of the game was equally impressive on other platforms - and its multiplayer environmental destruction system turned out to be a breath of fresh air in the genre.
It seemed that the free-to-play game The Finals had the potential to establish a strong foothold in the multiplayer gaming market. However, the reality turned out to be much less optimistic, and the future of the game may soon be in question.
Life of online FPS games isn't a bed of roses
The Finals had 242,000 players at its peak on the day of its release on Steam. Since then, there has been a continuous decrease in the game's popularity. It's difficult to clearly determine the reason - it's also possible that we are simply dealing with the outcome of several smaller negative factors. The following allegations are repeated among players:
- the game is poorly balanced;
- the formula for The Finals can be frustrating, as victory can be determined by the very end of a match, rather than how we play from the beginning;
- the title still has optimization issues and experiences frame rate drops even on mid-range hardware;
- progressing in the ranking feels very slow, and the choice of opponents is unfair.
For sure, numerous bugs, server problems, and cheaters didn't help either. However, the devs deserve credit for efficiently providing additional updates and new content (such as events). This represents a 74 percent proportion of favorable reviews on Steam that still remain "mostly positive" (74%). Some players even claim that the game may soon reach its perfect, "final" version.
Despite the latest game update (Wednesday, January 17) and a new event (Steal The Spotlight, which started the day before yesterday), the developers failed to stop the outflow of new players.
- In January, up to 116,000 people were playing The Finals on Valve's platform at the same time.
- Right now, the title is lunched simultaneously on 37,000 Steam user accounts.
If these data are compared to those around the premiere (see the chart above), we can conclude that Embark Studios' shooter faces a difficult future. Nevertheless, there's hope that the number of The Finals players will eventually stabilize at a reasonable level, and the developers will keep improving their FPS for years to come. History knows cases in which a large user drain didn't mean the death of the game - see Apex Legends.
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Author: Michal Harat
He graduated in Polish philology with a specialization in journalism at the University of Gdańsk. He fell in love with games at the age of 4, when his older cousin turned on his dusty Pegasus. He completed his first title, Wolfenstein 3D, in the basement of his friend from kindergarten (his father kept an outdated PC there). Today, he plays almost exclusively on consoles, mainly on Switch and PlayStation, but he also has a lot of retro equipment on which he makes up for what he missed as a child. He says about every soulsborne production that "it's a good game, maybe the best." In his free time, he reads books that no one is interested in and goes to the gym. He is a fan of the Berserk manga and films from the A24 production company.
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