The First Descendant has finally helped 2016’s The Descendant find a stable and growing player base

It’s safe to say that The First Descendant’s launch has been pretty successful. With a growing player count of more than 130,000 fans, and with no signs of slowing down, Nexon’s third-person looter shooter isn’t going anywhere soon. But it wasn’t the only developer to benefit at launch. We reported that 2016’s The Descendant saw a huge increase in player count after gamers got confused and downloaded the wrong title.

The Descendant is far from a looter shooter. Played across five chapters, where ‘the end of the world is only the start’, you play one of the few thousand ‘descendants of humanity’ who were handpicked to survive after the end of the world in bunkers known as Arks. It couldn’t be less like The First Descendant if it tried. Still, that hasn’t stopped it finding a stable, and impressive, daily player base off the back of FD’s launch. At the time of writing, more than 2,000 people are playing the game daily, with that number hovering around 100 just before The First Descendant confusion began. Would they have found it had Nexon not picked such a similar name as it?

The Descendant is a quaint puzzle game with exploration elements. While it’s received reviews ranging in the “Mostly Positive” bracket, it was critiqued for its lack of polished movement. The game features a similar narrative structure to Telltale’s games. Episodic storytelling, with decision-making and consequence a core component. To compare it slightly, Telltale’s The Expanse amasses roughly 50 players a day, The Wolf Among Us at 150, while The Walking Dead earns about 350. It’s a bit of a freak phenomena, and you can’t expect it to happen to many other developers, but you’ve got to admit it’s somewhat rewarding to see that an indie studio – whose other games peaked at seven concurrent players – is amassing more playtime than established and beloved teams.

We reached out to Gaming Corps AB for a comment.

About the Author

Talal Musa

Talal has been writing about videogames for nearly 17 years. He has interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry and leads content at BGFG.