The First Descendant "did not work" admits Nexon

Nexon recently honestly and brutally said that their game The First Descendant DID NOT SUCCEED!

Companies rarely admit something like this openly, especially when it's a fail. But Nexon did, saying "it did not work", and on top of that they even put it in an official presentation to investors! Something like that takes courage.

The CEO explained it all with one very simple sentence; "Strong launch, but no staying power", which basically means people came to play but didn’t stay until the end.

The situation is worse than anyone would think. The game had a huge start, around hundreds of thousands of players, but dropped to a shameful 5k players. Steam reviews are mixed.
The hype was strong, but in the long run it flopped.

According to them, the problem isn’t something they can just patch and fix. The point is that the core design of the game itself was bad. Poor retention, weak endgame, the grind isn’t really fulfilling, and the gameplay gets boring quickly. All of that falls under structural problems that can’t be fixed that easily because they are already hard-built into the game itself.

The CEO literally said that this isn’t something that can be fixed with a single update, but that it requires a complete change of the game’s system.

The game was made to look good at the start, but it doesn’t really have depth, a typical live-service fail.

There is hope though, but it’s very hard.
They are planning some kind of overhaul of the game, as well as changes to the core systems, endgame, etc...
But games like this unfortunately rarely recover.

Descendant looked like Destiny but didn’t have a soul, and players felt that instantly. And respect to Nexon for responsibly admitting failure, because something like that takes a lot of courage.