Dani’s current favorite online shooter is actually pretty damn good, but no one is talking about it anymore.
In my opinion, The Finals should be really shaking up the shooter landscape right now, where the hunger for quality has rarely been greater.
But it isn’t: only 15,000 Steam players are currently online at the same time at peak times. Even Battlefield 1 and Left4Dead 2 have more users! And when people talk about shooters, at least in my environment, The Finals is never mentioned.
But there’s so much to be said for The Finals! For example:
- It has the most detailed and impressive destruction engine in the genre, where entire city blocks are regularly and spectacularly blown to smithereens.
- It promotes creative teamwork because the combination of the numerous class gadgets enables nasty traps, ingenious maneuvers and surprising moves.
- It doesn’t cost a penny and scores with purely cosmetic monetization, while all gameplay content can be easily unlocked.
I mean, take three minutes and just look at these great physics:
And then, of course, there’s the high quality: The Finals is graphically stunning, the shooting behavior of the weapons feels powerful and high quality, and in general, the shooter simply shows the years of Battlefield experience of its developers, who reinvented themselves as Embark Studios in 2018.
»Nobody wants to try it«
Nevertheless, The Finals is increasingly threatened with irrelevance: Publisher Nexon announced in May 2024 that The Finals is falling short of internal expectations. Sales and player retention are not at the targeted level, it said. A fan debate immediately ensued.
Nexon Reveals The Finals Isn’t Performing As Well As Expected
byu/blitz_na inthefinals
In the Reddit thread reporting the news, the concern about the future of the game was mixed with a lack of understanding for the failure. The user ViperHotline received a lot of support for the following comment: :
Nobody wants to try the game and I just don’t understand why. Whenever I talk to my friends about it, the reaction is “Woah, that looks so cool,” and then they never play it – even the hardcore fans of Apex and Valorant.
It had actually looked really good for The Finals at the beginning! I’ve pulled up the numbers for a few other Steam shooters that I regularly fire up for comparison:
What is immediately striking is that The Finals had by far the highest peak compared to with 242,619 players simultaneously.
Since then, however, the curve has been almost continuously on a downward trend, as the statistics from SteamDB prove. Sure, the console numbers are of course missing here. But there are many indications that interest disappeared just as quickly as it had come in December 2023.
The Finals is picking up speed again
So apparently there is a lack of long-term motivation to keep players playing in the long run.
So are challenges, unlockable weapons, a battle pass and cosmetic fuss to decorate your character perhaps no longer enough? Does The Finals need to set new (and long-term) goals for itself in the future, goals that make the grind worthwhile from the players’ perspective?
Is The Finals perhaps simply lacking in marketing, in visibility on the players’ radar in general? Don’t many of them know about the existence of this fantastic shooter?
The developers at Embark seem to be taking a closer look at this problem now that they have Nexon as their distributor, and they are releasing significantly more trailers on platforms like Tiktok.
In Season 4, the Ranked mode, which had previously fallen out of favor due to a controversial change in the game mode, is also set to make a big comeback.
I’m curious to see if my current favorite shooter can regain momentum through these course corrections – or whether another great project will soon be pulled.
