TL;DR: Shooters have notoriously had a difficult time staying alive while under Nexon's banner.

Go ahead and spam your downvotes, but if you're someone that actually likes to engage in conversation, I urge you to read on.

Intro -- Personal

For starters, The Finals is my favorite FPS game to come out in the last 5 years. I've played since the second CBT and have loved just about every second of it. Prior to my time with The Finals, I was an Apex Legends nerd since release. The pro match hacking incident in Apex Legends is what pushed me over the edge; an edge that I was already barely hanging onto after 3+ years of awful decision-making, balancing, bugs, and tone-deaf MTX offerings. And going even further back 13-ish years (my time with League of Legends), I played Combat Arms for about 4 years and ran a very successful Guild.

Keep Combat Arms in mind for a little later.

The Final(s) Nail In The Coffin

HYENAS

At the time of the first The Finals trailer, HYENAS had been running in closed testing for about 8 months and was luke warm, to say the least. I actually find it very eerie how similar the HYENAS and The Finals were in terms of theming: heisters/contestants fighting for cash in arenas and needing to 'Cash Out'. HYENAS was a game I had on my radar for a bit and was semi-excited to tell my friends about because Apex Legends was in a really rough position and was growing stale in it's growth - we were looking for something else. It had some interesting movement mechanics, which myself and my friends were enamored by in Apex Legends, but nothing too crazy. I was hopeful. After about 2 testing runs, I phased out of HYENAS pretty hard and lost interest as it wasn't really what we were hoping it would be.

Breaking Convention

Fast forward to that 8-month mark, and the trailer for The Finals launches. It's this over-the-top explosive FPS with some crazy arena gimmicks, and holy shit it was pretty. The destruction was incredible, and the developers were touting server-side destruction so that it would be consistent for all players. The gameplay and graphics looked so familiar, and as it turned out, it was made by a bunch of ex-DICE devs. Count me in. Oh, and these were the same cats that released that short but impressive looking trailer for their other game Arc Raiders? Exceptionally promising pedigree, and an already promising duo of upcoming projects to boot. Couldn't be more excited. However... to this day, I don't know if I was getting struck by the Mandella Effect, but I swear I didn't see Nexon's publisher tag in the first few trailers. In any case, by the end of my first beta test, I was well aware and to say I was concerned would be an understatement.

The Good

Embark have done a phenomenal job at creating something unique in a market of Battle Royales and old titans slapping each other with wet noodles on bi-annual cycles. The Finals is insanely unique. Whereas a lot of games that try to break conventions like this tend to have iterations across many years and multiple development studios up to an eventual peak, the formula of The Finals feels like the final iteration of a genre that has never existed. Performance is top notch, the game does what it needs to do graphically and still has additional bells and whistles, and it had a near flawless release (all things considered). Were you to ask me, I could not imagine another game like The Finals existing in it's current exceptionally polished state. The next game like The Finals, whenever it comes out, will likely be exceptionally different. However...

The Bad

Lightning eventually breaks out of the bottle and disappears forever. The Finals, in all of its game design competency, has major issues for lasting in a market like today's and thankfully, for once, it's not actually due to it's MTX implementation and a greedy publisher (I say that cautiously, more on that later). No - the issue that The Finals has and why it's on a trajectory for shuttering is that it has almost zero skill expression. Let me explain.

Were The Finals released 12-ish years ago, it'd be a behemoth of an IP by now and likely would have changed the trajectory of the market in terms of player and audience capture. What do I mean by that? Well, lets look at games 10+ years ago - specifically FPS'. What was the primary appeal and objective? The appeal was an easy to pick-up game which allowed you to get into the action almost immediately. The objective? Click heads faster than your opposition. Game design around that time was rather linear in how it delivered the objective mechanism to the player. Give player gun, player click button; happy player. Competitive games have all existed, but competition now is vastly different.

Today, skill expression is the name of the game. It's not enough to click heads the fastest - that's not how you get your high anymore.

For DayZ, it was a masterful bait and deception. For PUBG, it was about maneuvering long before your opponent did and mastering weapon control. For Fortnite, it was about 'cranking 90s' and building the most optimal structure AROUND your opponent. For Overwatch, it was about chaining a series of abilities together into a combo that 6 players couldn't predict. For Apex Legends, it's about mastering movement in such a way that your opponent gets whiplash. Hell, even in Counterstrike - a game about holding angles - it's about mastering grenade throws.

The Finals... does none of that. You're not baiting anyone around fixed objectives. You're not out maneuvering when spawns are fixed. While structures exist around you, they serve more as an element of chaos than necessarily for control. There's no abilities to string together in some wombo-combo. Grenades are static and don't have a lot of physical attributes to facilitate against the environment like physics. And lastly, and this one hurts me the most because I was absolutely a sweaty try-hard in Apex Legends that spent hours in the shooting range practicing; while there is speed and movement in the game, you're not breaking the game's engineering to manipulate your movement in unintended ways - ways that become SO common... that the developer themselves puts those exploits in future season trailers for the game making them canon mechanics.

In other words, the skill ceiling is about as high as the desk players sit at to play the game. If you can move a mouse or a controller and click buttons, you're in. You just need to get familiar with the maps and weapons and... that's about it. :/

The Ugly

Don't believe me? Lets get numerical. Go look at Twitch stats for The Finals. Now, Twitch isn't an arbiter of truth in terms of a game's performance metrics, but it shows what players are watching. I'll save you the click: The Finals (at the time of writing) is the 215th most watched game. It's a whole 20 rows down on the front page. Now, players love watching high-skill play, but this also shows that even casual viewers still prefer casual games over The Finals. There is no external appeal. As much as I love this game, I'm not above a good joke, so I just wanted to highlight the irony of The Finals being a gameshow... and not being very popular as a show. Lol.

With all of the above said, the game is still in a relatively good position at this moment. Despite having very low player counts (no, I'm not the kind of person to spell doom for a game just because it's player count is dropping - it's on a normal interest decline curve), it requiring a low amount of players to start a game at all is a good thing. Unlike a BR or even a normal TDM-like game, you need a minimum of 9 players to start a round. A 9-player minimum goes a long way in expanding the ability to find a game with only 15,000-ish players. It puts it right in the comfy zone of co-op games like DRG or Vermintide. However, competitive games requiring a stalwart player count to be viable unlike co-op, so that's a bit of a problem right now.

So with that being said, it can always improve right? Something can change to bring back players and bolster it's numbers again, right? Well... um...

Nexon -- The Gravedigger

Nexon & Me -- We Don't Talk About It

My relationship with Nexon is long and... tenuous, at best. To me, Nexon is that family member that only ever comes to larger family get-togethers likes weddings or baby showers. They tend to give out some of the highest ticket gift cards but once the party is over, everyone finds that the giftcards are empty or deactivated. Nexon, over the years since it's arrival in the West in 2005-ish, has been flakey at best, and absent at worst. I'm envious of those who don't have a relationship with Nexon like I do because Nexon has truly been that family figure in my life of gaming since Maplestory - I have been apart of just about every major release pre-2016. I'm 31 now - that's over half of my life. Spoilers: It's not all been good. I'm happy to say that I've been able to communicate with a small handful of you over the last 18 months who have shared my same concerns and have the same history with them that I do.

I played Maplestory religiously. I played Mabinogi diligently. I played Kart Riders confusingly. I played Sudden Attack curiously. I played Combat Arms consistently. I played Vindictus excitedly. All of the previous, and a few more, intermixed with other games not made by Nexon - aside from Runescape, Nexon has been with me just as long, if not longer (depending on how you look at it). I know how Nexon is. I know how Nexon works. I know how Nexon behaves. With that said, it doesn't bring me any joy to pop the virgin cherry for some of you who don't know much about them.

Nexon Doing Nexon Things

I'll only be mentioning relevant titles here to paint the picture that needs to be seen.

• Maplestory - Nexon's most popular MMO. A mere shadow of what it used to be and caught in controversy of trying to be fresh, but appeal to players of the past. Extremely underpopulated now, and generally only played by people who spend money. Maplestory is arguably the birth place of MTX whales in the West. Whaling and spending is so engrained in Maplestory now, it's considered part of it's active culture. Still active, but in perpetual suffering.

• Vindictus - One of the very first (if not the first - feel free to correct me) MMO's in the West to introduce brawl-style active combat. Extremely modest MMO at the time. Lackluster story, but very appealing gameplay loop. Practically dead today, and it has succumbed (not necessarily a bad thing) to the 'Korean Developer' trope in introducing a bunch of scantily clad ladies. While the combat loop is still rock-solid, it has aged and others have now done it better (See Blade & Soul, etc). Still alive today, but I'm using that term very loosely.

(From here, the only relevant conversation pertaining to this thread will be about FPS')

• Combat Arms - THE absolute F2P FPS behemoth in the West (while Sudden Attack was still in the East). It's both surprising and not surprising how many people don't know or have ever heard about this game. In a time where CSS was still the primary talk in the West, Combat Arms started bringing the Eastern F2P heat. With the largest arsenal of any FPS game to ever be released in the West, Combat Arms was a beacon for the F2P formula behind Maplestory. The beginning of the end occurred with the release of the specialist class which signaled Nexon's decline into P2W depravity. It was now another thorn in the side of players beyond the rampant cheating. Combat Arms declined very quickly beyond that point, and was eventually sold to another company - starts with a 'V'. I can't remember.

• Sudden Attack - I'd have to double-check, but I'm fairly confident that this is still the most-played FPS in the world between SK and China primarily due to it's accessibility. While still active today, Western servers were shuttered in 2014. Sudden Attack 2 ceased development less than 2 months after it's release.

• Dirty Bomb - After Sudden Attack 1's shuttering, Dirty Bomb came onto the scene. Most people don't know it, but Dirty Bomb was one of the first major contenders to break into the scene that Overwatch eventually solidified. However, Nexon and Splash Damage parted ways, and less than a year later, Dirty Bomb shuttered as well.

• LawBreakers - We all remember this well roasted chestnut, don't we?

With all of the above information about Nexon's history, its fair to surmise that Nexon has a turbulent cycle serving as a publisher for games. This does not bode well for Embark.

I'd like everyone to remember that the people we engage with on a daily basis in the Discord are passionate Embark folk. This critique of Nexon has no bearing on Embark, however it's important to remember that they'll likely be affected, and it's a shame. Even in the best case scenario that The Finals doesn't shut down, but just maintains a low player-count, it will not serve well under Embark. Unfortunately it will affect Embark's pedigree more than it would ever affect Nexon as Nexon has the same priveledge and power of the likes of EA.

I'll be honest, when I first found out Nexon is the primary publishing house behind Embark, Nexon's history of shuttering games wasn't the first thing I thought of. The first thing I actually thought of was it's history of MTX in it's game. We all joke about horse armor and FIFA packs, but Maplestory led the charge of overbearing MTX in the West. Given today's game market, I was admittedly expecting a lot worse in terms of monetization for The Finals. I'm happy to report that I'm pleasantly surprised with it's current state. I still wouldn't say it's TRUE 'micro' like Helldiver's, but it's way better than a lot of other offerings, especially for me personally coming from a game like Apex Legends.

However, Nexon's influence still can't be ignored. You see, with a history like Nexon's you probably expect what we've all witnessed in the market over the last decade, but Nexon doesn't operate that way. They have a penchant of being rather silent during most, if not all controversies. Hell, just in general - controversies aside. Unlike bodies that we're familiar with like EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft and the like, Nexon doesn't speak outside of their games often, if ever. If you were at a public execution, all of the companies we're familiar with would likely be the Officiant at the pulpit. But Nexon? They're the executioner - completely silent and performing a duty without remorse. This is always how they've acted.

Closing Thoughts

I know I said above that the MTX concerns for The Finals kind of faded away for me as it doesn't seem to be an issue we'll have to worry about, and while it's not the main point of this post, I still find it necessary for players to keep in the back of their head, especially since Embark have other games coming out. Were The Finals not to shutter due to low player count, this is my PSA to all players moving forward, whether it be about The Finals or beyond: Nexon cannot be trusted.

"Well, duh! You can't trust companies anyway, nor should you. It's a company. It's incentive is profit."

To that I say, "That's not my point".

In today's market, we're typically used to a controversy happening in the game on top of whatever PR blunders is going on with the organization, but that's not what would really happen here. The Finals doesn't have any issues beyond it's declining player count, but I want everyone to remain aware of Nexon's moves going forward. Just because we don't necessarily see the smoke here doesn't mean that there isn't a fire somewhere else.

So, for your own interest if you'd like to research on your own, here are some topics of concern:

1. Variety of game closures and sunsets under contentious situations with developers and publishing partners alike.
2. Account security breaches (I guess a more relevant tangent would be GameGuard. Nexon was the first to widely use GameGuard when Maplestory came to the West. I personally don't care, but I know some others would.)
3. Various cases of government scrutiny world-wide due to addictive Gachapon implementations.
4. Speaking of Gachapon (and P2W), their recent suit around manipulating odds for a P2W item outside of it's listed values: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20240312050604
5. And lastly, most recently, Nexon pulling back public support for Maplestory's would-be world-first level 300 player when he used the opportunity to address genuine concerns about the game's current state, including the above lawsuit.