The First Descendant’s Steam player count has declined by 87% in the three months since its release

The number of active players in Nexon’s live service free-to-play shooter, The first descendanthas dropped by an average of almost 90% since the game’s initial release. Meanwhile, fellow free-to-play shooter Once Human is still thriving and even had a very similar number of players when it launched around the same time. The First Descendent is by no means quiet and still sees around 30,000 players per day, but the numbers aren’t the same as they used to be.

These stats come straight from the SteamDB page for The First Descendant and, at first glance, paint a pretty bleak picture of the game. Since its release, the player base has steadily declined, resulting in an average weekly player count of around 17,000. That’s down from the starting peak of 264,860 for the free Steam game. While the launch of the first season, Invasion, in August 2024 didn’t provide the boost you’d expect from a live service game, a more recent update does.

As you can see in the image above, the player base increased slightly from that average of 17,000 to the 24-hour high of 32,822 this weekend. This is thanks to an update released on Thursday, October 10, 2024, introducing Ultimate Freyna, a character quest, and much more for fans.

Of course, we expect players to abandon the game once they’ve tackled everything new in the latest update. It would be easy to say that this is par for the course with any free-to-play live service game, but Once Human bucks this trend with player numbers that are falling much more slowly and seemingly stabilizing.

The image above shows Once Human’s Steam player numbers since its release 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 averages just under 50,000 players per week and has a 24-hour high of 78,129 at the time of writing. That’s a much more encouraging 66% drop in player numbers.

Note that these games offer quite different experiences. The First Descendant is more story-driven and focused 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 mutant plane to collect loot from .

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

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