Live service shooter The First Descendant lost around 87% of its players in the three months since launch

The number of active players in Nexon’s live service free-to-play shooter, The First Descendant, has fallen by almost an average of 90% since the game’s initial release. Meanwhile, fellow free shooter Once Human is still thriving, and that even had a very similar number of players at launch from around the same time. The First Descendent is by no means quiet, still raking in around 30,000 players a day, but the numbers aren’t what they used to be.

These statistics are directly from the SteamDB page for The First Descendant, and at first glance, they paint a pretty grim picture of the game. Since its release, the player base has been in a steady decline, leading to an average weekly player count of roughly 17,000. That’s down from a launch peak of 264,860 for the free Steam game. While the launch of its first season, Invasion, in August 2024 didn’t provide the sort of bump you’d expect to see in a live service game, a more recent update has.

As you can see in the image above, the player base has bumped up a bit from that average of 17,000 to this weekend’s 32,822 24-hour peak. That’s thanks to an update that dropped on Thursday October 10, 2024, introducing Ultimate Freyna, a character quest, and much more for fans to dig into.

Of course, we’d expect to see players fall back off the game once they’ve tackled everything that’s new in the latest update. It would be easy to say that this is just par for the course with any free-to-play live service game, but Once Human is bucking that trend with player numbers that are falling far slower and seem to be leveling out.

The image above shows Once Human’s Steam player numbers since its launch on Tuesday July 9, 2024, which is pretty close to The First Descendant’s. While it has a lower all-time high of 231,668 players, it’s averaging just under 50,000 players a week and has a 24-hour peak of 78,129 at the time of writing. That’s a much more palatable drop of 66% in player numbers.

Note that these games offer quite different experiences from one another. The First Descendant is more story-driven and focuses on characters and quests, while Once Human is an open-world survival game with PvP, PvE, base building, and paranormal world enemies like a giant mutated plane from which you can gather loot.

If you’re looking for as many free resources and items as possible, make sure you’ve tried every one of The First Descendant codes we’ve got listed in our guide. We’ve also some other free PC games if you’re looking for something new.

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