A strong launch followed by a collapse is exactly the kind of trajectory a live service game cannot afford, and Nexon is now speaking with unusual bluntness about how The First Descendant failed to deliver in the long run.

Nexon has published the capital markets briefing it presented to investors on March 31, and the document offers a strikingly direct look at where the publisher believes it succeeded over the past year and where it fell short. Chairman and CEO Junghun Lee did not dress the situation up in vague corporate language. In his assessment, The First Descendant clearly belongs in the latter category, and he made that point with a level of candor large publishers do not usually show when discussing an underperforming live service release.

Lee grouped the game alongside Dungeon & Fighter Mobile, saying both titles launched with strong momentum but ultimately failed to retain players over time. In his view, the problem is not something superficial, nor something that can be patched over with a quick update. He argued that the retention systems were not strong enough and that the game suffers from design issues requiring structural changes to its mechanics. In other words, Nexon is not talking about routine support problems here. It is talking about weaknesses in the foundation.

That is especially damaging because it lines up with what the company already indicated in December 2025, when it delayed the game’s Season 4 update to Summer 2026 as part of a broader effort to rethink the core experience. At launch, The First Descendant posted numbers that looked powerful enough to suggest a major hit, reaching 10 million players within a week and peaking at 264,860 concurrent users on Steam. Since then, however, the trajectory has gone in the wrong direction, and SteamDB now paints a much more modest picture while the game continues to sit under a mixed user rating.

To be fair, this would not be the first time Nexon has tried to pull a struggling live service title back from the edge. The company stayed with The Finals through its own post-launch decline, and that persistence eventually paid off. Still, Lee’s wording here makes The First Descendant sound less like a game going through a rough patch and more like one that has already been internally filed under what did not work. The only real question now is whether Season 4 can produce a genuine turnaround, or whether Nexon is preparing to accept the loss and move on.

Source: WCCFTech, Nexon, SteamDB