On July 2, after much fanfare and numerous beta tests — including a couple of major ones — over the past two years, The First Descendant was launched for PC (Steam), PlayStation, and Xbox. This third-person looter shooter is powered by Unreal Engine 5 and pits players with unique abilities in solo and co-op missions.
Nexon's latest game has made quite a splash on Twitch over the past ten days, climbing into its top ten games rankings for watch time and peak concurrent viewership. It also entered the latter's corresponding list for video game releases this year, hitting a higher peak than other names that left a mark on the platform, like Content Warning, Zenless Zone Zero, Helldivers 2, and Wuthering Waves.
Between July 2 and 11, The First Descendant hit 11.6M Hours Watched and 162.7K Peak Viewers, averaging 49.1K viewers per stream. It outperformed many renowned titles that have been on top of the purple platform's top games list for years, including names like Fortnite, Minecraft, Counter-Strike, and Apex Legends.
Even when looking at the AV count, it makes the top ten list as only nine titles crossed 50K AV over the last ten days. Moreover, its Peak Channels count of 6.2K puts it third on the leaderboard during the same timeframe.
What has helped the game is the positive reviews it has received from various news outlets. Some of its more talked-about elements include cool-looking and charismatic characters to unlock and entertaining gunplay. Some might say that the countless currencies and materials make it a hard grind, but no shooter can say it is free of these exercises.
Many have also praised its fun gameplay, which makes it fun to kill the various monsters players come across when playing solo or in teams of up to four. Players have also praised the developers for having an open outlook and listening to their feedback, which has led to quick resolutions of most complaints that have come their way.
Speaking of fixes, the recent patch 1.0.2 has made some big changes that were well-received by fans globally. It also brought some much-needed improvements, including the promised matchmaking for hard mode Infiltration Operations and slowing down the speed at which the Instructor robot talks, as many had said it was too fast to keep up with.
Readers must note that the game had a 'mixed' rating on Steam at the time of writing. This was due to the various issues players faced that would mostly have been fixed with the abovementioned hotfix, so it will be interesting to keep an eye on the rating and see how well the game responds to the modifications and how happy users are with the results.
Returning to comparisons with other 2024 releases, The First Descendant performs pretty well to some of the three most popular names on this leaderboard, apart from leader Palworld. This action-adventure survival game from Japanese developer Pocketpair has been a runaway success thanks to its resemblance to the Pokemon series, albeit in a darker and grittier tone, hitting an astonishing 49.6M HW and 433.7K PV over the first ten days of its launch.
While Enshrouded managed 218.4K PV and 9.4M HW in its first ten days, Arena Breakout: Infinite recorded 218K PV and 10.3M HW. In fact, the next name on the list, Chained Together, also had remarkably similar audience figures, notching 217.5K PV and 9.3M HW. This means that The First Descendant did much better in terms of watch time, although the number of spectators at the peak of any particular stream was much fewer.
What aided The First Descendant in attracting so many viewers was the quality of streamers who have jumped onto its bandwagon. The likes of shroud, AdmiralBahroo, zackrawrr, and PirateSoftware have all been busy giving this title a try and sharing their playthrough experiences with audiences from around the world.
Shroud, in fact, has been a big reason for this initial success, attracting 244.1% more viewers than any other content creator in terms of watch time. He is known to be very open-minded when it comes to new releases and often pops up among the top channels when it comes to such games, but as far as The First Descendant goes, fans might not see him play that much more, of his last few streams are any indication.
The middle of the year is usually not a very hot time for video game releases, but this year, new video games have left their mark. Be it Zenless Zone Zero or the expansions of Final Fantasy XIV Online and Elden Ring, there's been a lot to talk about in the community. It remains to be seen if Nexon's offering can maintain its momentum for a longer period, but for now, fans are happy banding together and taking down monsters in their quest to become the first descendant.
