Nexon CEO Admits The First Descendant Has ‘No Staying Power’ — And a Patch Won’t Save It
Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney has publicly admitted that The First Descendant, the company’s free-to-play looter shooter, failed to retain players after launch — and that the problems run too deep to fix with a content update.
Speaking in a recent investor presentation, Mahoney said the game had “no staying power” and described ongoing “retention challenges.” The blunt diagnosis went further: “These are design issues that are not fixed with a patch.”
What Owen Mahoney Said — and What It Actually Means
The First Descendant is a third-person looter shooter built around a Destiny-style loop of killing enemies, collecting gear, and grinding for build upgrades across a sci-fi world. Nexon released it on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on July 2, 2024, making it a fully released live-service title now almost two years into its operational life.
At launch, the game generated real excitement. According to SteamDB, The First Descendant peaked at approximately 264,055 concurrent players on Steam on launch day — a number that positioned it as a serious Destiny 2 competitor in the free-to-play looter-shooter space. That number has since fallen dramatically, with the game regularly sitting below 10,000 concurrent Steam players in early 2026.
The CEO Named the Cause
Mahoney’s phrasing is significant because he is not blaming content cadence or a slow patch schedule. He’s saying the core systems — the grind design, loot tables, progression loop, and endgame structure — are what drove players out. That is a much harder problem to solve. You can ship a new season. You cannot easily retrofit a live-service economy without rebuilding significant parts of the game.
The Patch-Can’t-Fix-It Problem
This is a familiar failure mode in live-service shooters. Rec Room, which shut down after 10 years and 150 million players, is an extreme example of what happens when audience retention never translates to financial sustainability. When a game’s retention issues are structural — shallow endgame, gating mechanics that feel punishing rather than rewarding, loot tables that make meaningful upgrades feel statistically rare without being satisfying — those problems compound over time. Players who hit the wall leave, and new player acquisition can’t offset the churn rate. Mahoney naming this publicly, in front of investors, signals that Nexon has acknowledged the scope of the problem internally.
What This Means for The First Descendant’s Roadmap
This kind of CEO-level admission usually precedes one of two outcomes: a major systemic overhaul announced as a “2.0” relaunch, or a shift to maintenance mode while the studio redirects resources. Neither is guaranteed, and Nexon has not announced a specific turnaround plan in connection with these comments.
I’ve put a fair amount of time into The First Descendant since its 2024 launch, and the retention problem was visible early. The endgame loop relied heavily on repeating specific dungeons to chase stat-optimised module builds, but the loot table variance was brutal — you could run the same content a dozen times without meaningful progress. The game’s Descendant roster (its playable characters, equivalent to Destiny 2’s subclasses) had strong visual appeal but often felt mechanically similar at the mid-game tier. Those aren’t patch problems. Those are systems problems.
Where This Leaves SEA Players
The First Descendant has a meaningful SEA player base, particularly in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The game is free-to-play on PC via Steam and on console storefronts, with in-app purchases available — pricing varies by region.
If you’re still actively grinding TFD, Mahoney’s statement is worth taking seriously. A game whose CEO describes it as lacking “staying power” is at real risk of entering a slow content decline. That said, if Nexon does commit to a systemic rework, this is the kind of candid self-diagnosis that can precede a genuine turnaround — see the recovery trajectories of Final Fantasy XIV after its 2.0 relaunch, or No Man’s Sky after years of sustained updates.
What to Watch For Next
The immediate question is whether Nexon follows up Mahoney’s investor comments with a public roadmap for structural changes. Watch the game’s official channels for any announcement of a major system revision, progression overhaul, or season format change. Absent that, the current trajectory — slowly declining concurrent player counts and a CEO acknowledging design-level problems — is not a healthy sign for long-term investment in the grind.
Source: PC Gamer — Nexon CEO admits The First Descendant had ‘no staying power’
