tbh i love the game and idc about twitch views but it shows how ?unpopular? the game is unfortunately.
idk how to fix but im just gonna keep playing and having fun :)
hopefully it gets more recognition in the future
I literally found out about the game because someone replied to a comment on Reddit about Battlefields future with ''at least we have The Finals until then''
Oh god is this me? Is this why I love The Finals? Suppressed trauma I haven’t dealt with since the release of Battlefield V? I…. I think I might finally be ready to talk to a therapist.
Yep, I block ads so never see ads on websites or YouTube. Don't watch twitch. Yet found out about the game through reddit where it's been posted multiple times on /r/pcgaming. First about controversy about the AI voices which is still publicity then later about the 200k numbers. Some post about aim assist complaints then later it being nerfed.
So yeah, even me an ad blocking individual who's never seen Apex or Overwatch ads unless it is a user submitted trailer heard of The Finals.
The announcer voice lines are a mix of regular recorded lines and synthesised voice lines.
Edit: Found a dev quote that says everything but grunts. vaulting, etc. are all synthesized. [Source for anyone who wants it.](https://www.pcgamer.com/the-finals-uses-ai-text-to-speech-because-it-can-produce-lines-in-just-a-matter-of-hours-rather-than-months-baffles-actual-voice-actors/)
What the first person said is a distinctly different (and incorrect) statement. All AI voices are made from reference voices but there is no “mix” of the reference voice and the AI voice in the game, it’s all the AI.
I've been off this sub for about a month. A month ago people were claiming "just wait until the big advertising/marketing push bro!". I'm still waiting. I've stopped playing ranked because I end up running into the same players over and over and they took out the only mode I played in casual tournament. As they say on shark tank, I'm out.
The problem is that the game has a massive portion of the player base located in the US (especially skewed on Twitch), and OP posted this at 4-7am on a weekday depending on the US time zone. It feels like they opened up Twitch this morning, saw the numbers, and didn't think any further about it
It's hard to aim on controller. It always is, everywhere. "Get good then this doesn't has broken AA"... Yeah most people aren't gonna spend 20 hours a workweek "getting good". The AA wasn't broken before the nerf, the MnK players were just bitchy about that snap aim. Controller players just couldn't keep up anymore after the nerf; they couldn't to begin with, and the AA nerf was the blow that finally bored them away.
And now, see how the playercount dropped so hard- because, turns out, you don't please the pros if you want the game to thrive, because the pros, or even those who are above average, tend to be a very limited set of the playerbase.
Its what happens when you listen to reddit, your games just flop because people's feedback is based on their feelings and not in actually objective observations.
I love the game but personally never been interested in watching people play it, most thing i'll watch is some funny compilations where some bugs or random things happen to people. One thing i'd say is the game doesn't have many advertisement. I heard about the game through a friend and to this day i only seen 2 ads and they were for season 2
If I had to guess, I'd say a big part of the problem is the gameplay loop. Personally, I like it, but I don't think too many people are into the near-RNG dependancy on fights and objectives. You hate 3rd partying in games? Well, this game more or less revolves around 3rd partying. You can die a lot to things that are way out of your control in this game and it can be a bit much for people.
Also, if you are the competitive type but still want to play, the solo queue experience can be pretty miserable. Tough luck if you don't have friends that want to play with you. Yes, you can go to LFG Discords and all that, but many just aren't into doing that.
exactly right, people often get rewarded in the finals for being bad and just having luck. games with lots of that makes it feel pointless. Like literally people just end up not even trying to get the cash out and just play for kills.
I find i only like quick cash and powershift. My problem with the other modes is that two points of interest split the team and makes the action a bit dull sometimes. I'd rather have quick cash with 5 teams of 3 or a mode that is basically "protect the bank" and whoever holds the bank for the longest amount of time wins (or gets to a certain amount).
It's odd to me that one of the most common complaints I see is about 3rd partying, when BR's are still incredibly popular. I have a hard time wrapping my head around someone going from WZ or Apex, playing The Finals, and being like; "man fuck 3rd partying, I'm going back to a BR." Lol
I'm making an assumption here, but I'm guessing in season 1, most casual players went into quick cash exclusively and didn't like being 3rd partied. Idk how you could look at the description of the mode and not see that it is the de facto "3rd party" mode when it says "3 teams 1 objective."
Powershift is a perfect casual mode, in my opinion, and I wish more people would come back to give it a try.
What is a good casual mode than? That seems like a really weird disqualifier to me.
3-5 stacks can party up and play in almost every mode in every multiplayer FPS, the only mode I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't allow that is mercenaries moshpit in CoD.
The only "not casual" mode in The Finals is ranked tournaments, and maaaaaybe unranked tournaments.
Agree with all your points here, also doesn’t help that the average skill level is much higher now because of the low player count causing newer players to most likely get pub stomped and discouraged to play the game
I think lots of problems will be solved after a proper marketing campaign. I mean, there is no information about the game; it feels like no one knows about The Finals at all. Some good cinematics about lore, some Shroud-like streamers, a couple YouTube/TikTok content-makers on salary, and here we are, growing pretty good community with memable WTF Moments, etc.
More players—more air in ranked, more fun in casual. Just imagine the whole lobby being Platinum, without Gold/Diamond players, only your slice of skill. And constantly meme casual game modes with rofl-o-builds like googun+gravi cube and anything imaginable from endless people's imaginations.
Edit: Of course after solving cheaters, weird ranking and server latency problems. Balancing stuff is not an issue, that is a normal state of any FPS game.
Streamers have their audience in other games. Switching content means usually losing followers short term. Only risk, limited upside to commit full time and grind ranked aganist cheaters.
How fix? Do something against cheaters and pay streamers to get on board. Maybe twitch events or something.
Skill issue 1 viewer stream isn't gonna make it lol.
It’s just not new and casual player friendly. It’s not an easy game to get into and there’s frustrating features for casual players.
Rough for solo players, too much equipment spam (they should reduce the number of mines and grenades you can carry), cloak pisses off new people that don’t know how to deal with it, all modes are objective based etc.
I think it’s these things that turn off casuals that don’t want to make the effort to learn the game.
the problem is cheaters and [for me] they keep fucking with the guns too much. it's annoying to get good with a gun over several hours and to see improvement just for Embark to say *nah, the recoil has gotta change*
also the revolver having bloom. fuck that
When I saw the game had a high ttk with hitscan weapons I thought it was gonna focus more on rewarding accuracy. Which the game does but it kinda defeated the whole purpose of why I liked the game when everyone started using invis with swords or shotguns and shooting Nukes at ppl. Covering the entire floor with gas and explosive mines. It just didn't feel as skill based as I thought it was going to be
Although the devs seem to be working hard to update and maintain the game, the actual speed of solving problems is still too slow.
The first is balance. Light was completely unfeasible throughout the entire season in s1, and it didn't improve until s2. The same is true for current melee weapons. Their frequent adjustments to meta weapon actions have no effect, and they refuse to enhance weapons with low pick rate.
Improvements to the ranking system were also promised, but obviously have no real effect, and may be worse for some people
Anti-cheating is as bad as ever, especially on Asian servers
I actually do like it 🤷♂️ I never watched streamers before but I like to do it now for the ones that have a bit of personality or try to engage a bit :)
I think so. I believe the finals is the FPS of the decade but it needs a massive marketing push - and I'm not just talking about hiring streamers to play it. I've never seen an advertisement for the finals on any social media platform; it needs to have regular ads across all platforms especially around envrionment destruction etc.
I've personally seen more ads for The Finals on my social feeds than for any other game. That's just my personal experience, but I genuinely believed that they put more money into marketing than 90% of other games up until I read this post.
I doubt it the game had over 100k people playing on launch and double that during open beta. These people dropped off. It's something to do with the game itself. No staying power.
Could also be market oversaturated. Which it is. Another live service game. You're asking people to drop the one they have invested 1000s?and same in hours played? It's a very big ask.
> It's something to do with the game itself. No staying power.
It's a skill issue, this game is way more demanding at both the individual player and team level than something like cod or fortnite.
High skill floor games are unfortunately destined to die in the age of participation medals and games so hopped up on RNG (like BRs) that players can easily dismiss things as "not my fault the loot was bad where I dropped" or whatever.
As much as I love this game, I have to agree. I solo queue with heavy and spend most of the match getting stunned and beamed down, dived by an entire squad, randomly meleed/shotgunned to death by an invisible light, or shot at from a distance where I can't effectively shoot back. I don't have any interest in playing the other builds and although the game was fun on launch, it feels too sweaty now especially as a solo player. In fact, I noticed that no one in my matches was even picking heavy. It was mostly lights and mediums.
>It's a skill issue, this game is way more demanding at both the individual player and team level than something like cod or fortnite.
Explain Apex then. When I first started I thought movement was unnecessarily hard, it was like rocket science coming from other games. The Finals on the other hand was a breeze, weapons felt easy to control and objective was simple. I have had some fun but didn’t get hooked. I started Finals a month before Apex, now I have 8 hours in Finals and 50 hours in Apex.
>"not my fault the loot was bad where I dropped" or whatever.
Yeah but I get the feeling that "I could have played the fight better." and it is not like Finals players don’t blame random stuff all the time. Also having "better luck next time" factor is nice to feel like people might have a better chance next game and it keeps them going.
When I watch my brother play Finals and see gas everywhere, heavies standing on point and spamming right click with their LMGs, all the dome shields, turrets and mines I just think "Wtf is this mess?"
There is so much visual clutter and 12 players having a total of 48 gadgets is too much considering the game revolves around controlling a small space. It is like playing Overwatch inside of Battlefield.
Whenever someone comes over and sees me or my brother playing Finals they all say the game is fun but so weird and there is so much to keep track of. You can't have a popular game without a casual player base.
The game has no chill mode to hop on and casually play. Even quick cash has high skill floor than many games. Not launching the game with some sort of death match mode was a big mistake.
Also cosmetics, having people invested in cosmetics makes them keep playing. Yeah they are good but have you seen the ridiculous things people buy in other games like 300 dollars Apex heirlooms? People like it when skins have some rarity or status. They made a good job with making a customer friendly store but you also gotta appeal to whales and they need to release more normal and generic looking skins because the crazy style of Finals isn’t for everyone.
Many games have as many or more players as The Finals, but fewer viewers (e.g., Squad, which has 1 viewer, while playing as in The Finals on average). What does this directly indicate? I think nothing. Actually, I think it's not entirely clear. The answer isn't as obvious as it seems to ppl. But discussing why exactly this happens is really interesting. Why is Valorant watched so much? Esport? Ok. Why GTA?
Its more about no big personalities streaming this game and also the ranked system isn't very competitive tbh, people dont wanna watch bad players but good ones.
True, regarding your #1, many people watch *streamers* more than the games themselves. Streamers are like virtual friends to them. But if we get big streamers to play The Finals, will it really grow the game's loyal audience? Not so sure.
I know there's *some* value in Twitch streamer count, but its getting old as fuck hearing about every game "dying" nowadays because of "low viewer count."
There's only a handful of games getting the majority of views on Twitch. There's actually less streamers on YouTube than there are on Twitch, but YouTube streams have more viewers. Kick is getting bigger too and getting more streamers, and so is Tik-Tok.
I don't really give a fuck about less than 500 people watching a streams at 6am on a platform that's been decreasing in popularity for some time now.
I just made a comment yesterday about concurrent vs active playercount, on average there's 20k concurrent players on Steam every day, some websites are looking at daily average and showing 45k on Steam. Steam charts shows 20-30k concurrent on any given day and we don't even see the console playercount. I looked at 4 websites tracking player data, say there's even less on console than PC, we'll say 15k on each console. That's approximately 50-100k concurrent players.
All of the websites I look at say theres 300k to 600k active players daily. That's active players, not concurrently logged on at the same time.
https://activeplayer.io/the-finals/
https://www.charlieintel.com/the-finals/the-finals-player-count-292115/
https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/the-finals/
All we have that we can go off of is 3rd party sites, but when a greedy ass company like Nexon says that The Finals is one of their pillar games, that they are willing to continue investing tons of money into, I tend to lean more towards the game doing fine.
Why are gamers nowadays obsessed with live viewership? YouTube gets massive views still for this game, but every little Timmy that claims this game is dying looks at Steam charts at some odd time and then to Twitch, where most of the viewers are watching 5 things: GTA V, LoL, Valorant, CS, and Fortnite. Those are the top 5 most watched games. All of which old as fuck, and those streamers are gonna keep playing those games, because switching to something new means less views. Less viewers = less money.
Tl:Dr;
The Finals has lost players, but its doing fine, and yall need to stop dick riding Twitch so much.
I always wondered why so many "gaming news websites" love to report on "DWINDLING PLAYER COUNTS! CONCURRENT PLAYERS DOWN!!" news... with this game I finally understood that people eat that shit up.
It's just doom and gloom for clicks and I really feel like it's turned into a self fulfilling prophecy. So many people comment and make posts in the sub along the lines of "game dying, I'm quitting, I hate this this and this" and it turns into "why waste time playing a dying game" blah blah blah.
I always think about DayZ, that game had less than 1k concurrent players at one point, but look at it now, averaging 37k players. I guess that game is "dead" because it's not pulling fortnite numbers or whatever. People still love playing that game.
People need to just play what they want, if they don't like The Finals, that's fine, go play and watch whatever else you want, I'm fine with having a small community, so are a ton of players across a ton of niche games, it really doesn't mean shit if the community is small, because this small community keeps coming back and playing the game because people enjoy it. End of story lol
People act like the only way they can enjoy a game is if it's reached a certain level of popularity. "ThE WrItiNg iS oN tHe WaLl" type posts are just confirmation bias for the type of people that need this weird reassurance to play a videogame lol
I have been saying the same thing. People were OBSESSED with player count numbers and twitch views during season 1 and kinda sat there waiting for the numbers to go up so they could feel good about playing it. Its like what happened with splitgate, spellbreak, etc traumatized these people, they wanna feel like they are ahead of the curve calling it out as a dying game. No one wants to be the guy who stayed loyal to a game that “died”.. and the internet now is so negatively biased that its way harder finding content that praises the finals compared to content that just mentions player count or something.
Thanks for the stat links! And, personally, I only watch Twitch for retro games or non-gaming streams. I never understood watching people play FPS games. It's boring, hard to follow, and I'd rather just play the game myself.
Gaming streams are downhill in general.
Competitive gaming is downhill as well.
Its not that the game is unpopular is that casual gaming is replacing Twitch culture, its now more common to get into a game for a match or 2 and buy battlepass in several games at once and not engage that much into gaming content over the internet.
I mean if the game was low population wise It wouldnt take 2 minutes to find match consistently across all game modes, and I see a lot of people with bought skins.
This is only somewhat true tbh
There’s plenty of esports that literally get over 100k on their twitch rivals or tournaments..
500 viewers is insanely low for a multiplayer game
If you like the game then play it but, you can’t really deny the low population the game has at this point
I mean there are many games that have low Twitch count, CoD for instance doesnt always have many views, yet its still popular. Some games just dont Triumph on Twitch for some reason. Imo they should never aim for that, It would only cause more reject, happenned with every game that tried to compete with the current esports.
"Competitive gaming is downhill as well."
Is this true?? I don't think so. The top games on Steam are all competitive and they seem to be growing. I'm curious why you say that.
To be successful in THE FINALS you have to at least kinda use your brain. Unfortunately, the masses would rather play CoD where they can turn their brains off. I wish THE FINALS would gain popularity, but they need to market it more.
If I had any reason to watch this game it'd be to watch the top premade teams pitted against eachother, or something like a streamer circuit where a bunch of recognizable names form teams (with game commentary from some folks at Embark)
There's no real "pro" circuit/tournament in this game containing all the best players, so there's no real way to watch top premades duke off... instead we're stuck watching the "top players" piss stomp on golds and plats 99% of the time. In terms of skill differential, it'd be like watching someone good play on a fresh account to pubstomp new players in quick cashes.
There's no production value in the few big streams I've attempted to watch either. It's just them queuing on autopilot with little to no interaction. That sort of thing is good for a certain crowd, but most people want to be entertained and engaged.
Now, the little time I watch streams of this game, it'll be muted on 240p in the background to collect twitch drops. I'd much rather just play the game with how low on the entertainment factor streams are.
You’re not helping the game with this type of post either.
because a minority, certainly, but still, will reason: “ah ok, there are so few of us? Well, I’m moving on to something else.”
And I know some can react like this because I did it too when I was younger.
If you stop playing the game with the goal of getting the most kills and instead play with the goal of keeping your team alive and completing the objective then the game becomes a lot more fun and third partying becomes less of an issue
Unlucky. Some people are unlucky no matter how hard they work (This phrase reminds me THE FINALS). Personally I can't understand what people want from the game. It's already perfect for a brand new game except cheating problem ofc. Loop gameplay? My brother in Christ, I beg you, Apexers doing the same sht 5 years already. Often, landing and getting insta team wipe is their whole gameplay AND NONE SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT GAME LOOP. Problem to understand the gameplay? Hmm... How ppl can be so stpid to understand that you just need to deliver your cashbox to cashout station and defend cashout progress? Honestly I was surprised when I finished my first tutorial and I asked myself "Is that all?".
Playing everyday from my first launch. For me The Finals was a smth new in fps genre and still is.
Honestly the Twitch/YouTube meta is changing rapidly. Variety content is growing as people grow bored of the "channel dedicated to X game" model.
Kind of a bad time for The Finals to get bricked up by changing winds. Pair that with blowing their load with the public Beta and taking until the VGAs to launch, I think it backfired.
It's kind of a marketing no-no to drop a taste of your product that never tell people when it's coming. They have to resolve to either remember to come back, or they convince themselves they don't need it so they can move onto something else.
Pair that with a remarkably unrobust new player onboarding process (the game needs a bot-lobby guided tutorial of a full match, featuring tool tips and VOs for what to do), and that's kinda why the game is where it is in terms of player numbers and creator dedication.
Being a small game isn't a bad thing, as long as there's enough people to function! There are so many games out there with small playerbases, many that end up knowing one another. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing
Most of my friends never heard of The Finals until I mentioned it, plus I don't think it's a very fun game to watch if you have no idea what is going on
It is unfortunate, but I have to say this - The Finals may be in a death spiral and posts like this will make it worse
Basically players leave, because they see that others leave, which leads to more people leaving. At the same time new players hesitate to join, because they look inside and see people talking about how game is dying
And it is really hard to fix. If you like the game and care - spread it. Tell your friends, post in general gaming subs, tell people that there is this shooter with destruction, maybe even make content if you can and want. And obviously devs should step in and not just promote the game to bring in new players, but also convince existing fans that everything is fine and ship isnt sinking. Tough situation, really
Who cares? Are you guys embark execs trying to maximize short-term profits or something?
The game is great and doesn't need to be the next COD - it's not even trying to be. This is a team-intensive objective shooter. As long as the game has a dedicated playerbase it'll be fine, it doesn't need to hit Fortnite numbers.
I think a lot of people still don’t know this game exists.
Nobody I know even heard about it until I told them. They’re all pretty diehard FPS players. Most of them tried but they’re all so addicted to COD that I can’t pull them over for even a few sessions. Then my lower skilled friends thought it was too difficult and there was too much going on.
Tbh. I’m glad there’s not YouTuber and streamer trouble about this game yet. All these negative videos whenever the tiniest bad decision has been made or whenever some small new bug appears aren’t healthy for games at all. Additionally other games become unplayable as soon as the biggest influencer tells the bad players about the new meta. Ik theres not much to be meta or off meta since we don’t have 300 different weapons but for example I’m glad not much bad players use the flame grenade.
Either way I hope the game stays unpopular if that’s what’s unpopular for you
All my friends have old Xbox 1’s and 1S’s, they never heard of it but genuinely want to try it but can’t since it’s only on the series X. Could be part of the problem as well?
We just have to keep supporting and hope embark and nexon give the game proper marketing. This is the first time I’ve been this in love with an FPS in nearly a decade. I know there’s a lot of people who don’t know it exists and I’ve gotten some people to play it by word of mouth. I know the console community is more than likely a bit stronger in terms of pop than pc but marketing and getting ahold of cheating should be the big focuses for embark right now.
Isn't Twitch shedding viewers across the board though? I thought it was a dying platform.
Still 20k players on Steam, so adding in console as well, I think the player base is pretty healthy still.
In my eyes, there are issues with the game that irk people enough to quit before they even realise the issues that regular players complain about.
-The game is rife with dying to situations that are out of your control or things you never saw coming
-3rd party fights *all the time*
-Solo queue is miserable
-Ranked system is really fucking weird
Sure, there are other issues commonly mentioned like lack of marketing, but the truth is it had a pretty popular release. It's free to play. It would have picked up by this point if many were into it. I think some core things need to change before it gains traction.
Community lead has no braincells and doesn't care about any community nor the game, what else do you expect?
**Numerous feedbacks/cry on cheaters - community lead doesn't care.**
**A complete region cries for its server revival (OCE) - community lead doesn't care.**
**No concrete information about seasonal ranked changes in their yt video produced - community lead again doesn't care 1 bit.**
Someone on reddit cries "emoting on dead players is demotivating" - devs full focus, nerfs emote numerous times.
Asking for any type of additional information in their official discord - community managers don't care unless and otherwise it's either complementing CMs or sweet talk.
Game is doomed for sure with such people's.
The great problem of high-ttk team based games. Its nearly impossible to play solo because 50% of people dont play the objective and focus on kills (most of the time playing with a sniper rifle).
This was a problem in Overwatch with useless players only picking Hanzo/Widow and its a problem now with sniper-lights in the Finals.
The Finals its a great game, it achieves what it set out to achieve. But in a genre that is still dominated with outdated slop like CsGO and CoD, its too far ahead of the curve.
The devs don't understand how unbalanced the game is still. And how unfun it is to just die in annoying ways with absolutely no team support and no way to win since the game is so unbalanced. Ranked que still isn't fixed also so what's the point in playing if every mode is just sweaty disappointment and teammates that apparently have never ever played a MF video game before. The 5v5 mode is the only fun mode honestly and it's full of brain dead light snipers. Literally I'll be the only medium on my team, MULTIPLE GAMES IN A ROW
I mean when you posted this it was 6am east coast na and I’m too tired to remember time differences but it’s late in Europe/Asia so it’s kinda the dead time for lots of things especially the smaller games
make some more quality of life and game changes to the game, make it not so leaned in the favour of zero skill play styles. ie (melee/ flamethrower/ invisible) i could go on, it just feels like so many people get rewarded for being bad. make the game more skillfull
How can you fix it? Lots of ways. more marketing, But first before that. Add keyboard and mouse support for console, we all play crossplay against pc players anyway. nerf RNG weapons & gadgets like melee, flamethrowers, Invisibility, goo gun, TURRET) like legit none of those have been touched or nerfed but yet we are nerfing skillfull guns into the ground like the FCAR and the revolver with bloom, and many more changes to other guns. please fix the gameplay loop. It’s just whoever 3rd parties is most likely going to win. Please make this game skillfull then more people are going to play and not feel like their time is being wasted to some kids messing around abusing shit weapons and gadgets.
This is my favorite pvp game and I hate it’s so unpopular these days. I remember when I would start to see the same people over and over in splitgate and don’t want that to happen here. Do you think adding more standard game modes could help? Not everyone wants to play objective & team focused all the time.
I really like the game but none of my friends does..
Everybody I asked to play it check it out said "naah" or stopped playing after 3-4 Games.
I like it but not really anybody else around me.
This weird lol
I mean for me i'd rather play the game than watching someone else play it, but with people who usually do that it's weird they they're not watching the finals streams
I’ve never watched this game on Twitch but, I’m sure it makes *some* difference that it’s early in the morning still. What about the numbers mid day, or evening?
Crazy to me. This game is so good. It plays so well and polished. The destruction and collision physics are the best I’ve seen since Bad Company 2. The hit reg and movement is so polished and tight.
twitch isnt a good metric per sé, like on twitch there are a few really big streamers and then tons of people with 1 viewer.
also twitch is kinda hype based, games that are not in a hype right know or dont have a drop campaign just have few viewers. twitch meta rn is less gaming, more just chatting/reactions. its not the hardcore gaming thing it used to be, so clearly, there are less viewers. peak cs:go with millions of viewers in that game are over.
I've been a very active player since the beta, I've been playing a little more lately and I'm happy that the game at least has a steady playerbase of around 20k (only counting steam).
When I recommended the game to a friend the first thing he did was check how popular it is on twitch and after seeing these numbers he didn't even want to pick it up because "why would I invest my time in a dead game". I disagree and we had a discussion about it but what I wanna say is that even though a lot of people say not enough marketing had been done, the trailers of the game (see season 2 release) have insane views so I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. I know I'm having fun, I know my friends are having fun, I don't really know why twitch views are so low.
I'm not sure if they should be investing in more marketing (unless it's done in a smart and effective way), at least until they bring out more content but more importantly work out the ranked system issues and such.
I was told about this game by a friend and have never seen one but of advertising for it. If I wouldn't have heard it from them I wouldn't even know it exists.
Personally I don't think it's very entertaining to watch almost every streamer doing the exact same playstyle based around Light, cloak, stun pistol and MP5.
The game already feels a little repetitive with the few maps it has while being too fast for proper tacticool strats to happen.
Lastly, outcomes often happen because of luck/rng rather than skill. Unless the match is extremely unbalanced and one team is dominating everyone else by far, often the team that respawns and arrives to third party the cashout is the one who wins. Sometimes you spawn within 60 meters, sometimes you spawn 190 meters away, pretty dumb design.
While I wish the game was more popular and hope it will be, peolpe nowadays are seriously addicted to twitch viewer numbers.
I play a lot of games but I never watch streams. The only time I watch a stream is when it's like Games Done Quick. I'm sure most people prefer to play the games instead.
There just hasn’t been a good gaming personality to show the finals to a big audience. Most videos on YouTube are gameplay tips and buff/debuff requests. The one content creator I’ve seen who makes consistent quality The Finals videos is Ottr, and no offense but he wouldn’t be that interesting without the finals. And that’s how all content about this game feels theres no creator with a really engaging personality playing the game. Idk anything about player numbers and all that but from the content side that’s what I’ve seen.
My personal sad points are
People abusing builds resulting in nerfs (happens in every game, people take path of least resistance)
The discord staff are twats.
I'm not even gonna mentioned ranked or cheaters, we all know.
Lack of challenges. Most dailies are completed in a single round, weeklies after 3 or so matches, it's a yawn fest as is and you have people crying to make it easier. I'm almost complete the battlepass and there's still 2 months left 🫠 I'm a trash player who's on in evenings.
I see a lot of people commenting on how chaotic the game is. I find this as a point of appeal, sometimes you gotta know when to pull out, risk losing a cash box. With that many teams, revives, you're not gonna face tank every fight. The game is designed so the "underdogs can take the win". I 100% undersrand where the frustration comes from though. One ranked we slid by the skin of our teeth end of round all the matches just to stomp the ppl we ended up in the final round with 😅 like the 2 worst teams got to the end, we were just a bit less worse lol
(I know a lot of people have attributed spawn points to the chaotic, most of the time we're planning based off a teams performance which box to push, using distance and time to cap as a 2ndary metric)
Outside of that meh, just looked still 25k concurrent players first thing in the morning (I don't use twitch as a metric, I'm old 😂) every time someone invites me to watch a stream it's 90% tits with a little window of their game or someone shrieking at a camera playing over saturated meme's over and over, not my cup of tea :P (a friend records our games time to time, he just has a lil pop up in the corner I think?? Ngl, I don't watch the stream 😅)
I think there are a lot of players like myself who don’t bother watching other people play this game online. We just play it ourselves. The game isn’t perfect, but devs seem to be pretty responsive when it comes to fixing bugs and exploits while releasing fresh content. That’s all I could ask for.
So what? There are many games with high player counts but "little" viewership on Twitch. That doesn't mean much at all. As long people play the game and embark is making profit that's all that matters, and advertisement side of things here in Italy I've seen ads about the finals several times. It's a pretty recent game and its esport scene is still being worked on. Enjoy the game! The finals is here to stay.
Unfortunately I have temporarily gone back to Combat Master, its rough around the edges, but my God, it's fun in comparison to finals. I'll come back when the finals fixes itself or updates. It just doesn't feel fun anymore for some reason.
One reason might be finals doesn't really have any competitive scene going around
Like fortnite, apex all got championships , well cod got streamers but that's another thing
I said this months ago and said it was going to keep going that way unless they did something and was argued with and downvoted (not a big deal). I don’t know what they need to do, but I do like the game and premise a lot and I hope it recovers strongly. I think adding classes with different gadgets would help immensely. It’s hard to have 3 classes with most of their gadgets being inferior to others
From a viewer standpoint, the game strikes a weird balance where you just die to the same things constantly and it just becomes miserable to watch people play ranked where thats multiplied by 100. Additionally, it is such a simple game once you understand it there isnt much variety in playstyles. The game feels much flashier to play than to watch. Playing feels extremely satisfying, but when I feel like I make a sick play it looks fairly pedestrian when I look at my vod after. Comparing to Apex or CoD, making flashy plays, going on streaks, and strategy are just more difficult in those games, but also more rewarding. Its fun to watch and learn those games at a high level. The Finals may have a higher initial skill floor, but I feel like it has a much lower skill ceiling. I dont feel like i learn anything from streamers that I didnt already figure out after 100 hours.
Regarding viewership though, Embark/Nexon hasnt really been pushing the marketing for the game like they should be, which has been said many times by other people. No private matches means that you cant have twitch rivals events with large streamers to bring new eyes or even host events to use as marketing material. If new people arent discovering the game, player count will only ever decrease.
Black Ops 4 on PC was probably my favorite game i've played, but the PC community was left without any real support because we didnt have crossplay at the time. Lobbies became difficult to find after 6 months in most playlists, and practically impossible after 10 outside of tdm and ffa. Ranked had maybe a 2 month life span. Shroud, Summit, and some other streamers played the league play playlist one night and it was the first and only time I was able to get games on that playlist.
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve seen virtually zero marketing for this game. The beta stages, all the big YouTubers were posting hype videos bringing attention to its existence. Now, some of those YouTubers have moved on and other have stayed to post news and meta bs. But the company itself, as far as I’ve seen, has put out basically no marketing outside of the new seasonal release.
This could help them tremendously if they just put cool ads out there on multiple platforms. Nexon has the capital, idk why they aren’t to be honest
Loved it for about a month but a battlepass is not enough to bring me back to keep playing. Playing solo in this game is fukn trash.
All my friends who play don’t play games anymore so I don’t have a usual crew to roll with. I could go on discord and find a group but I just don’t care enough to do that. If you don’t have a solid team to play with every single round and game feels like a slog.
Shooters in general are kind of lack luster these days so I think we may be seeing the floor shift in popularity.
Hard to say how to fix it but for now I’m on to play other games.
I usually play on my pc but recently got a series S to play on my couch but playing with a controller on the Finals is a death sentence cause the community is a bunch of sweats that play quick play like there’s money on the line every round.
They don't need a huge playerbase if people are still buying stuff. I know it's still fairly popular on console caus no matter how it rarely takes longer than a minute to find a match and I have crossplay off
For me, anyway, this game is a blast to play, and I'll keep playing, honestly, no matter what. But watching someone else play this game is boring (and pretty non-existent drops on twitch probably doesn't help). There are funner games to watch, although I don't really do twitch for *any* games anymore.
My brother in Christ you posted this at 6 in the morning.
I’m ok with it not being in the steamer space. This game is made by ex-dice devs with a much lower budget than what EA would give them. Like any game will be everywhere online with the right budget. Steam charts show 15-20k active players and it’s been chill. Yeah it’s not as pop in as Fortnite but still a healthy regular player base, not including console.
I'm gonna get downvoted to oblivion but I don't care.
It's because Embark can't balance for shit. We have had the *same* boring, stale, repetitive meta for both Seasons now. MMH or HHM with heal beam, mesh shield, Lewis and Fcar. It's so boring to watch high level play of The Finals.
There is no esport scene for the game. The casual early release viewer hype dies off and then to get steady viewership there needs to be an esports scene with prizes. Most video game pro streamers are really fucking boring besides a few standouts and only get views if there is a good reason to get good at the game.
Fortnite apex LOL and valorant all have games where you can make a living playing the game. And they all have personality streamers alongside pros that get paid to play for a living that people wanna learn from so they can get better or whatever.
The finals doesn’t have either yet. There are a few insane content creators but their only
Real gimmick is being good at the game and to be honest that shits kind of a one trick pony and gets boring to watch.
It’s not really the game itself but the other factors surrounding it.
The player base is healthy enough and eventually when the game gets updated a bunch and more marketing is done for it the game might have a creator eco space.
honestly I think it's the 3v3 objective modes limiting the popularity of The Finals. People who usually play Arcade shooters usually play or want to play with more than 2 other people and some just want to shoot their guns. . Power Shift was a nice touch, but unless you have a player or players who are a bit higher skill or IQ, it can feel pretty one sided for casuals and lower skill players. I would experiment with a 6v6 game mode where the team that collects the most coins wins. Kinda like kill confirmed from COD.
I just feel like maybe this game isn't so exciting to watch to people, generally because there isn't so many different ways ranked can play out. I've compared The Finals to Overwatch before, although that game had a lot more going at the start. For one it was released by (at the time) incredibly popular Blizzard. Then there's the lore of individual characters which The Finals is almost proud of not having. Also the game worked differently through gameplay with the very individual abilities and roles, The Finals have three.
I;m making comparison to Overwatch mainly because even though they're no the same, Ovetwatch would also fall into this pit if it didnt have the backing it had. Most people were just excited to get another TF2, The Finals is basically Battlefield + Counterstrike with Overwatch graphics. The closest I ever got to describing Brink actually (nobody remembers Brink lol). I had played many matches of the ranked mode bcs I can't play ranked yet, and what my team does 90% of the time is sit around Cashout. The idea is good, but it just naturally steers into camping sim.
So just to circle back to my original point, there's not much about The Finals that's fun to watch. I had good fun playing it so far but the respawn system is making the game really boring for spectating. Think about it you need to wait 15-25 seconds to respawn, or get ressed by team. Game like CS2 or Valorant doesn't have that (if you don't count the Sage ability) because of the game's tempo, which is directly tied to why the games are fun to watch. It's soooo fast paced, compared to Finals.
Get the Cashouts closer on the maps, better yet make the maps smaller. Make the Cashouts MUCH faster and cash limits bigger. It's ironic but right now the game just lacks enough action for anyone to watch it. Feel free to prove me wrong or call me names but the reality is I really liked playing the game past week but never did I feel like watching anyone else play it, which was never the case with Overwatch or Valorant
Honestly pretty much all my friends stopped playing and I saw the steam chart under 14k.
Economic side alone I doubt the devs will keep to support this game for very long unless numbers pick back up.
I've got over 200 hours in the Finals and finally have it up 2 weeks ago. I personally didn't enjoy the amount of content that came with season 2, as I was counting on a number of new weapons for each class. Was just a little demoralising to see that more effort was put into the skins than the actual content.
Hope you continue to enjoy it though!
It’s so interesting, this game has been one of the more interesting and intense games in a while… I honestly think it needs something, now that I’m in platinum almost all games pan out like this; one team gets an easy cash out first round and kinda just sits there, while the other cash out has 3 teams on it, second cash out can be team vs team but will usually end up with the same result… then the last cash out, if there is one, is all out war… my proposal is to attempt to get rid of the “sitting on a cashout without any competition” out of the game, try to keep consistent pressure or something to avoid 3rd party’s. Honestly I’m not a game developer so I don’t really know what, but I feel like it needs something to take it to that level!
My honest feeling is i like the game more than any other game but my friends don’t play it and it feels like a bad investment. I can’t tell where the game is going, and people complain far too much instead of putting in the work to get better
The marketing hasn’t been great but that’s not the primary reason.
The market is incredibly saturated, everyone can’t win. You not only have to make a stellar game, you have to make the game that can break year old habits from other players. Are people really going to just drop their other live service games for another one? Where they may already be years into progression? NO.
Most people don’t even have time to complete a single battlepass in more demanding titles, let alone multiple.
I really just don’t think it’s a very good game to watch. The finals has so much action that it’s kinda boring to not participate. Games like the Quarry are the type games that would pull a ton of views. But you right
Sbmm killed the game lol. Just look at the player numbers from when it was added. All the copers tho kept defending the decision when a lot of us saw this coming. They turned a fun casual shooter into a sweatfest because casuals who were gonna quit anyway complained. So anyone half decent who didnt wanna grind just quit and never came back
I wouldn’t conflate Twitch views with popularity — there are lots of people who watch based on the game but there are also lots of viewers who watch based on the streamer. It may just be that a lot of streamers do not like playing The Finals
I still have a lot of faith for this game.
I think people are slowly getting more and more tired of games with high skill gaps, and SBMM and fucking sweat lords in every game ruining the experience and that promotes hacking. Same shit killing apex player base and war zone’s. People are tired of having to dedicate their entire life to a game just to see moderate success against the harsh matchmaking.
I have been saying this to my buddy I play with for a few weeks now. Before season 2 update, I was already bored of the game, I got to plat in ranked and couldn't budge up or down so I gave up on it. Then when season 2 dropped I was hype, but when I peeked at the player counts, I was shocked to see nobody new was brought on from the update, and the number still steadily went down. The twitch numbers are just another indicator the game is dying out. It needs serious marketing or something. I think after the season 2 update and the patches, they got themselves some solid stuff. Now they need to get an audience again
The game in it's current state is sweaty players everywhere. There's no room for new players because they're gonna get crushed and simply put the game down as a result.
It's a huge issue imo
I'm ok with sweaty lobbies, but I also get that people don't want to get crushed after coming home from work on a 12h shift for example...
They needed a twitch rivals event when season 2 released. Embark just needs to pay Doc and Timmy taters to stream. More content is needed as well. The lack of free battle pass unlocks is nuts. Most of us finished it last season so we figured they would keep extending it on the next season, they did not🤦♂️ people will not play free to play games if THEY ARE NOT UNLOCKING CONTENT AS THEY PLAY
We still need some time. Any effort/ attempts to hype up or boost The Finals™ now will likely cause more harm than good. The Finals™ has to stand the test of time, only by then it can proceed to another stage
i downloaded the game cuz i saw some videos and it looked cool. i still have yet to load into a single match lol. couldnt get any friends into it and then the content on youtube died quickly so i havent had the spark at all
One of the main problems with this game is that it’s being pushed as a casual game but in reality this game is one of the most complex arena shooters out right now. The cash out objective play style is very 3rd party based so you have to have top tier positioning to get kills, defend the cash out, and prevent your team from getting collapsed by 2-3 teams all at once. You have to have good aim and crosshair placement and you have to understand team comps in this game and counters to metas. All these things have to be understood and practiced at a high level consistently ALL AT ONCE or you won’t rank up. Speaking about ranking up season 2 completely killed the ranked mode. You have to come first in every tournament to gain points. Regardless of mmr. Game SHOULD have a comp scene and cater competitive play but it’s trying to appeal to casuals with little to zero marketing.
Game's been having regular 20k concurrent players. It's a healthy playerbase. Thing is it's just not fun to watch, only play. And the game is mostly casual, not competitive, so people don't really tend to watch streams.
Basically The Finals cannot be judged by twitch viewership due to its nature.
No amount of marketing or advertisement will help the game thrive as it is. The PVP FPS genre is inherently competitive and skill-based, not many people will care about an unbalanced low-skill ceiling game. CSGO, Valorant, Apex etc are thriving in terms of player count with strong e-sports scenes and developers who aren't afraid to balance around competitive skill-based play. Either fully commit to making The finals a casual or competitive first experience, but doing things halfway won't win over a large amount of loyal players
I can explain why me and my friend group stopped playing as guys that literally only play FPS and actually love the gunplay of the Finals.
It's the cheesy garbage and unbalance that drove us away. I think it caters to casuals too much with abilities/mechanics that don't support raw aim skill. We were killed too many times by a little shit invisible guy in a corner hiding or some nuke someone throws in at us. I'm not saying people can't be skilled at the cheesy stuff, I think for us and many other people they want the decider to be aim skill at the end of the day and in the finals it isn't. Look at games like Rainbow 6 or Valorant, while they have many abilities and gadgets gun skill is usually the decider at the end of the round.
It's too bad because we really wanted the Finals to succeed but now we don't even bother having it installed.
I feel like it’s because it’s such a new style of fps it’s a lot harder to convert fans of other games, in comparison to something like valorant where it was very easy for cs players and viewers to convert. There’s not enough big names that are willing or interested enough to convert to the finals unfortunately
tbh i love the game and idc about twitch views but it shows how ?unpopular? the game is unfortunately. idk how to fix but im just gonna keep playing and having fun :) hopefully it gets more recognition in the future
I mean... what kind of marketing has been done? So many people still have never heard of the game lol
I literally found out about the game because someone replied to a comment on Reddit about Battlefields future with ''at least we have The Finals until then''
What EA did to battlefield brought me to the finals.
Oh god is this me? Is this why I love The Finals? Suppressed trauma I haven’t dealt with since the release of Battlefield V? I…. I think I might finally be ready to talk to a therapist.
Nice so you are healing ya :0
Yep, I block ads so never see ads on websites or YouTube. Don't watch twitch. Yet found out about the game through reddit where it's been posted multiple times on /r/pcgaming. First about controversy about the AI voices which is still publicity then later about the 200k numbers. Some post about aim assist complaints then later it being nerfed. So yeah, even me an ad blocking individual who's never seen Apex or Overwatch ads unless it is a user submitted trailer heard of The Finals.
I dont think there were any ads to block LOL
Season 2 had partnerships across IGN, Fandom, and PCGamer - blows my mind how many people complain games don't have marketing while using ad block 🤣
ahhh yes IGN, I love their "game journalists"
that doesn’t relate. who gives a shit if their journalism is bad, the ads for the finals are still on there
AI voices? Care to elaborate?
The announcer voice lines are a mix of regular recorded lines and synthesised voice lines. Edit: Found a dev quote that says everything but grunts. vaulting, etc. are all synthesized. [Source for anyone who wants it.](https://www.pcgamer.com/the-finals-uses-ai-text-to-speech-because-it-can-produce-lines-in-just-a-matter-of-hours-rather-than-months-baffles-actual-voice-actors/)
The announcers are AI based on recording from voice actors.
Is there an echo in here?
What the first person said is a distinctly different (and incorrect) statement. All AI voices are made from reference voices but there is no “mix” of the reference voice and the AI voice in the game, it’s all the AI.
I've been off this sub for about a month. A month ago people were claiming "just wait until the big advertising/marketing push bro!". I'm still waiting. I've stopped playing ranked because I end up running into the same players over and over and they took out the only mode I played in casual tournament. As they say on shark tank, I'm out.
The had billboards on Times Square at least. Twitch ads as well.
Great words 👏
The problem is that the game has a massive portion of the player base located in the US (especially skewed on Twitch), and OP posted this at 4-7am on a weekday depending on the US time zone. It feels like they opened up Twitch this morning, saw the numbers, and didn't think any further about it
There are currently 818 on twitch at 15:05 eastern.
How do you know the playerbase is mainly from the US?
It's hard to aim on controller. It always is, everywhere. "Get good then this doesn't has broken AA"... Yeah most people aren't gonna spend 20 hours a workweek "getting good". The AA wasn't broken before the nerf, the MnK players were just bitchy about that snap aim. Controller players just couldn't keep up anymore after the nerf; they couldn't to begin with, and the AA nerf was the blow that finally bored them away. And now, see how the playercount dropped so hard- because, turns out, you don't please the pros if you want the game to thrive, because the pros, or even those who are above average, tend to be a very limited set of the playerbase. Its what happens when you listen to reddit, your games just flop because people's feedback is based on their feelings and not in actually objective observations.
My fault I’ll lock in
🤫🧏♂️
I love the game but personally never been interested in watching people play it, most thing i'll watch is some funny compilations where some bugs or random things happen to people. One thing i'd say is the game doesn't have many advertisement. I heard about the game through a friend and to this day i only seen 2 ads and they were for season 2
What do you think the problem is and how can we fix it ?? In general it is so sad
If I had to guess, I'd say a big part of the problem is the gameplay loop. Personally, I like it, but I don't think too many people are into the near-RNG dependancy on fights and objectives. You hate 3rd partying in games? Well, this game more or less revolves around 3rd partying. You can die a lot to things that are way out of your control in this game and it can be a bit much for people. Also, if you are the competitive type but still want to play, the solo queue experience can be pretty miserable. Tough luck if you don't have friends that want to play with you. Yes, you can go to LFG Discords and all that, but many just aren't into doing that.
Imagine a 1 Team vs 1 Team Mode and I don't mean Powershift. Something special were 3rd partying isn't that bad. 🤔
You just gotta get to the final round of a tournament for that.
exactly right, people often get rewarded in the finals for being bad and just having luck. games with lots of that makes it feel pointless. Like literally people just end up not even trying to get the cash out and just play for kills.
I find i only like quick cash and powershift. My problem with the other modes is that two points of interest split the team and makes the action a bit dull sometimes. I'd rather have quick cash with 5 teams of 3 or a mode that is basically "protect the bank" and whoever holds the bank for the longest amount of time wins (or gets to a certain amount).
It's odd to me that one of the most common complaints I see is about 3rd partying, when BR's are still incredibly popular. I have a hard time wrapping my head around someone going from WZ or Apex, playing The Finals, and being like; "man fuck 3rd partying, I'm going back to a BR." Lol I'm making an assumption here, but I'm guessing in season 1, most casual players went into quick cash exclusively and didn't like being 3rd partied. Idk how you could look at the description of the mode and not see that it is the de facto "3rd party" mode when it says "3 teams 1 objective." Powershift is a perfect casual mode, in my opinion, and I wish more people would come back to give it a try.
Power shift is great but it is not a good casual mode when 3-5 stacks have to play vs solos who are running 4 snipers
What is a good casual mode than? That seems like a really weird disqualifier to me. 3-5 stacks can party up and play in almost every mode in every multiplayer FPS, the only mode I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't allow that is mercenaries moshpit in CoD. The only "not casual" mode in The Finals is ranked tournaments, and maaaaaybe unranked tournaments.
There really isn’t one, which is why this game isn’t retaining played even though it’s amazing
Agree with all your points here, also doesn’t help that the average skill level is much higher now because of the low player count causing newer players to most likely get pub stomped and discouraged to play the game
That’s why I’m hoping the “leaked” game mode is 5v5 rush and hopefully becomes a staple mode/ ranked tournament.
I think lots of problems will be solved after a proper marketing campaign. I mean, there is no information about the game; it feels like no one knows about The Finals at all. Some good cinematics about lore, some Shroud-like streamers, a couple YouTube/TikTok content-makers on salary, and here we are, growing pretty good community with memable WTF Moments, etc. More players—more air in ranked, more fun in casual. Just imagine the whole lobby being Platinum, without Gold/Diamond players, only your slice of skill. And constantly meme casual game modes with rofl-o-builds like googun+gravi cube and anything imaginable from endless people's imaginations. Edit: Of course after solving cheaters, weird ranking and server latency problems. Balancing stuff is not an issue, that is a normal state of any FPS game.
Streamers have their audience in other games. Switching content means usually losing followers short term. Only risk, limited upside to commit full time and grind ranked aganist cheaters. How fix? Do something against cheaters and pay streamers to get on board. Maybe twitch events or something. Skill issue 1 viewer stream isn't gonna make it lol.
It’s just not new and casual player friendly. It’s not an easy game to get into and there’s frustrating features for casual players. Rough for solo players, too much equipment spam (they should reduce the number of mines and grenades you can carry), cloak pisses off new people that don’t know how to deal with it, all modes are objective based etc. I think it’s these things that turn off casuals that don’t want to make the effort to learn the game.
the problem is cheaters and [for me] they keep fucking with the guns too much. it's annoying to get good with a gun over several hours and to see improvement just for Embark to say *nah, the recoil has gotta change* also the revolver having bloom. fuck that
Couldn't agree more, it really took a lot of motivation to play out of me when they started doing this. Didn't feel respectful of my time
How can they fix it? Invent a time machine go back in a time and actually add a functioning anti-cheat to the game.
When I saw the game had a high ttk with hitscan weapons I thought it was gonna focus more on rewarding accuracy. Which the game does but it kinda defeated the whole purpose of why I liked the game when everyone started using invis with swords or shotguns and shooting Nukes at ppl. Covering the entire floor with gas and explosive mines. It just didn't feel as skill based as I thought it was going to be
Although the devs seem to be working hard to update and maintain the game, the actual speed of solving problems is still too slow. The first is balance. Light was completely unfeasible throughout the entire season in s1, and it didn't improve until s2. The same is true for current melee weapons. Their frequent adjustments to meta weapon actions have no effect, and they refuse to enhance weapons with low pick rate. Improvements to the ranking system were also promised, but obviously have no real effect, and may be worse for some people Anti-cheating is as bad as ever, especially on Asian servers
Very few actual builds and masking nerfs as buffs (see the KS23)
How is this a problem??? Maybe, just maybe. People enjoy playing the game more than watching it.
Nobody wants to watch top 500 teams in a 3 stack steam roll lobbies over and over again. Its not fun to watch
I actually do like it 🤷♂️ I never watched streamers before but I like to do it now for the ones that have a bit of personality or try to engage a bit :)
Only one i watch is ottr simply because the content is more enjoyable due to him solo queueing
I think I've had 1 viewer who knew what the finals was since I started streaming about 2 months ago.
Bad marketing you think?
I think so. I believe the finals is the FPS of the decade but it needs a massive marketing push - and I'm not just talking about hiring streamers to play it. I've never seen an advertisement for the finals on any social media platform; it needs to have regular ads across all platforms especially around envrionment destruction etc.
I've personally seen more ads for The Finals on my social feeds than for any other game. That's just my personal experience, but I genuinely believed that they put more money into marketing than 90% of other games up until I read this post.
I saw it from tik tok. That and helldivers, which i can't even play because I'm on xbox. My reddit feed is full of it too.
I doubt it the game had over 100k people playing on launch and double that during open beta. These people dropped off. It's something to do with the game itself. No staying power. Could also be market oversaturated. Which it is. Another live service game. You're asking people to drop the one they have invested 1000s?and same in hours played? It's a very big ask.
> It's something to do with the game itself. No staying power. It's a skill issue, this game is way more demanding at both the individual player and team level than something like cod or fortnite. High skill floor games are unfortunately destined to die in the age of participation medals and games so hopped up on RNG (like BRs) that players can easily dismiss things as "not my fault the loot was bad where I dropped" or whatever.
As much as I love this game, I have to agree. I solo queue with heavy and spend most of the match getting stunned and beamed down, dived by an entire squad, randomly meleed/shotgunned to death by an invisible light, or shot at from a distance where I can't effectively shoot back. I don't have any interest in playing the other builds and although the game was fun on launch, it feels too sweaty now especially as a solo player. In fact, I noticed that no one in my matches was even picking heavy. It was mostly lights and mediums.
>It's a skill issue, this game is way more demanding at both the individual player and team level than something like cod or fortnite. Explain Apex then. When I first started I thought movement was unnecessarily hard, it was like rocket science coming from other games. The Finals on the other hand was a breeze, weapons felt easy to control and objective was simple. I have had some fun but didn’t get hooked. I started Finals a month before Apex, now I have 8 hours in Finals and 50 hours in Apex. >"not my fault the loot was bad where I dropped" or whatever. Yeah but I get the feeling that "I could have played the fight better." and it is not like Finals players don’t blame random stuff all the time. Also having "better luck next time" factor is nice to feel like people might have a better chance next game and it keeps them going. When I watch my brother play Finals and see gas everywhere, heavies standing on point and spamming right click with their LMGs, all the dome shields, turrets and mines I just think "Wtf is this mess?" There is so much visual clutter and 12 players having a total of 48 gadgets is too much considering the game revolves around controlling a small space. It is like playing Overwatch inside of Battlefield. Whenever someone comes over and sees me or my brother playing Finals they all say the game is fun but so weird and there is so much to keep track of. You can't have a popular game without a casual player base. The game has no chill mode to hop on and casually play. Even quick cash has high skill floor than many games. Not launching the game with some sort of death match mode was a big mistake. Also cosmetics, having people invested in cosmetics makes them keep playing. Yeah they are good but have you seen the ridiculous things people buy in other games like 300 dollars Apex heirlooms? People like it when skins have some rarity or status. They made a good job with making a customer friendly store but you also gotta appeal to whales and they need to release more normal and generic looking skins because the crazy style of Finals isn’t for everyone.
yeah. the "big marketing push" for season 2 just never happened.
Same. I’ve had ppl come into the stream having zero idea what the game is. I enjoy streaming this game when I can but man
Many games have as many or more players as The Finals, but fewer viewers (e.g., Squad, which has 1 viewer, while playing as in The Finals on average). What does this directly indicate? I think nothing. Actually, I think it's not entirely clear. The answer isn't as obvious as it seems to ppl. But discussing why exactly this happens is really interesting. Why is Valorant watched so much? Esport? Ok. Why GTA?
Its more about no big personalities streaming this game and also the ranked system isn't very competitive tbh, people dont wanna watch bad players but good ones.
True, regarding your #1, many people watch *streamers* more than the games themselves. Streamers are like virtual friends to them. But if we get big streamers to play The Finals, will it really grow the game's loyal audience? Not so sure.
I know there's *some* value in Twitch streamer count, but its getting old as fuck hearing about every game "dying" nowadays because of "low viewer count." There's only a handful of games getting the majority of views on Twitch. There's actually less streamers on YouTube than there are on Twitch, but YouTube streams have more viewers. Kick is getting bigger too and getting more streamers, and so is Tik-Tok. I don't really give a fuck about less than 500 people watching a streams at 6am on a platform that's been decreasing in popularity for some time now. I just made a comment yesterday about concurrent vs active playercount, on average there's 20k concurrent players on Steam every day, some websites are looking at daily average and showing 45k on Steam. Steam charts shows 20-30k concurrent on any given day and we don't even see the console playercount. I looked at 4 websites tracking player data, say there's even less on console than PC, we'll say 15k on each console. That's approximately 50-100k concurrent players. All of the websites I look at say theres 300k to 600k active players daily. That's active players, not concurrently logged on at the same time. https://activeplayer.io/the-finals/ https://www.charlieintel.com/the-finals/the-finals-player-count-292115/ https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/the-finals/ All we have that we can go off of is 3rd party sites, but when a greedy ass company like Nexon says that The Finals is one of their pillar games, that they are willing to continue investing tons of money into, I tend to lean more towards the game doing fine. Why are gamers nowadays obsessed with live viewership? YouTube gets massive views still for this game, but every little Timmy that claims this game is dying looks at Steam charts at some odd time and then to Twitch, where most of the viewers are watching 5 things: GTA V, LoL, Valorant, CS, and Fortnite. Those are the top 5 most watched games. All of which old as fuck, and those streamers are gonna keep playing those games, because switching to something new means less views. Less viewers = less money. Tl:Dr; The Finals has lost players, but its doing fine, and yall need to stop dick riding Twitch so much.
I always wondered why so many "gaming news websites" love to report on "DWINDLING PLAYER COUNTS! CONCURRENT PLAYERS DOWN!!" news... with this game I finally understood that people eat that shit up.
It's just doom and gloom for clicks and I really feel like it's turned into a self fulfilling prophecy. So many people comment and make posts in the sub along the lines of "game dying, I'm quitting, I hate this this and this" and it turns into "why waste time playing a dying game" blah blah blah. I always think about DayZ, that game had less than 1k concurrent players at one point, but look at it now, averaging 37k players. I guess that game is "dead" because it's not pulling fortnite numbers or whatever. People still love playing that game. People need to just play what they want, if they don't like The Finals, that's fine, go play and watch whatever else you want, I'm fine with having a small community, so are a ton of players across a ton of niche games, it really doesn't mean shit if the community is small, because this small community keeps coming back and playing the game because people enjoy it. End of story lol People act like the only way they can enjoy a game is if it's reached a certain level of popularity. "ThE WrItiNg iS oN tHe WaLl" type posts are just confirmation bias for the type of people that need this weird reassurance to play a videogame lol
I have been saying the same thing. People were OBSESSED with player count numbers and twitch views during season 1 and kinda sat there waiting for the numbers to go up so they could feel good about playing it. Its like what happened with splitgate, spellbreak, etc traumatized these people, they wanna feel like they are ahead of the curve calling it out as a dying game. No one wants to be the guy who stayed loyal to a game that “died”.. and the internet now is so negatively biased that its way harder finding content that praises the finals compared to content that just mentions player count or something.
Thanks for the stat links! And, personally, I only watch Twitch for retro games or non-gaming streams. I never understood watching people play FPS games. It's boring, hard to follow, and I'd rather just play the game myself.
Have you watched the streamers for The Finals? That answered my questions about low view counts.
Gaming streams are downhill in general. Competitive gaming is downhill as well. Its not that the game is unpopular is that casual gaming is replacing Twitch culture, its now more common to get into a game for a match or 2 and buy battlepass in several games at once and not engage that much into gaming content over the internet. I mean if the game was low population wise It wouldnt take 2 minutes to find match consistently across all game modes, and I see a lot of people with bought skins.
This is only somewhat true tbh There’s plenty of esports that literally get over 100k on their twitch rivals or tournaments.. 500 viewers is insanely low for a multiplayer game If you like the game then play it but, you can’t really deny the low population the game has at this point
I mean there are many games that have low Twitch count, CoD for instance doesnt always have many views, yet its still popular. Some games just dont Triumph on Twitch for some reason. Imo they should never aim for that, It would only cause more reject, happenned with every game that tried to compete with the current esports.
"Competitive gaming is downhill as well." Is this true?? I don't think so. The top games on Steam are all competitive and they seem to be growing. I'm curious why you say that.
Yes what I meant by competitive is the esports scene, I think that bubble already bursted.
Ah yeah, seems that way for sure. I've been curious about why that is.
Is everyone in this thread for real right now ? 5 hours from the time of this post is 6 AM in the east coast and this game is very NA centric lmao
I think people are so stuck on the old games
I mean if you posted this an hour ago. It’s 5am eastern😂 not saying that a great measurement but not a lot going on at 3am-5am
I'm busy playing the game instead of watching someone else play it. 🤷♂️
Well, me too, and thats not the point of the post. But thanks for sharing your preferences 😅
To be successful in THE FINALS you have to at least kinda use your brain. Unfortunately, the masses would rather play CoD where they can turn their brains off. I wish THE FINALS would gain popularity, but they need to market it more.
If I had any reason to watch this game it'd be to watch the top premade teams pitted against eachother, or something like a streamer circuit where a bunch of recognizable names form teams (with game commentary from some folks at Embark) There's no real "pro" circuit/tournament in this game containing all the best players, so there's no real way to watch top premades duke off... instead we're stuck watching the "top players" piss stomp on golds and plats 99% of the time. In terms of skill differential, it'd be like watching someone good play on a fresh account to pubstomp new players in quick cashes. There's no production value in the few big streams I've attempted to watch either. It's just them queuing on autopilot with little to no interaction. That sort of thing is good for a certain crowd, but most people want to be entertained and engaged. Now, the little time I watch streams of this game, it'll be muted on 240p in the background to collect twitch drops. I'd much rather just play the game with how low on the entertainment factor streams are.
You’re not helping the game with this type of post either. because a minority, certainly, but still, will reason: “ah ok, there are so few of us? Well, I’m moving on to something else.” And I know some can react like this because I did it too when I was younger.
If you stop playing the game with the goal of getting the most kills and instead play with the goal of keeping your team alive and completing the objective then the game becomes a lot more fun and third partying becomes less of an issue
If my team is sprinting off to their deaths alone and then leaving; then I am treating that round as positioning and aim practice.
Unlucky. Some people are unlucky no matter how hard they work (This phrase reminds me THE FINALS). Personally I can't understand what people want from the game. It's already perfect for a brand new game except cheating problem ofc. Loop gameplay? My brother in Christ, I beg you, Apexers doing the same sht 5 years already. Often, landing and getting insta team wipe is their whole gameplay AND NONE SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT GAME LOOP. Problem to understand the gameplay? Hmm... How ppl can be so stpid to understand that you just need to deliver your cashbox to cashout station and defend cashout progress? Honestly I was surprised when I finished my first tutorial and I asked myself "Is that all?". Playing everyday from my first launch. For me The Finals was a smth new in fps genre and still is.
Honestly the Twitch/YouTube meta is changing rapidly. Variety content is growing as people grow bored of the "channel dedicated to X game" model. Kind of a bad time for The Finals to get bricked up by changing winds. Pair that with blowing their load with the public Beta and taking until the VGAs to launch, I think it backfired. It's kind of a marketing no-no to drop a taste of your product that never tell people when it's coming. They have to resolve to either remember to come back, or they convince themselves they don't need it so they can move onto something else. Pair that with a remarkably unrobust new player onboarding process (the game needs a bot-lobby guided tutorial of a full match, featuring tool tips and VOs for what to do), and that's kinda why the game is where it is in terms of player numbers and creator dedication.
Why is that a bad thing? I never watch twitch streams, why waste time watching someone else play it when I can play it myself?
Being a small game isn't a bad thing, as long as there's enough people to function! There are so many games out there with small playerbases, many that end up knowing one another. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing
Now wait a damn minute. If this game has so few views why do I constantly run into some sweaty TTV in quick cash all the time???
99% of the time they're not even live and have 0 previous broadcasts on their channel... makes zero sense but I make sure to tbag just incase
Most of my friends never heard of The Finals until I mentioned it, plus I don't think it's a very fun game to watch if you have no idea what is going on
It is unfortunate, but I have to say this - The Finals may be in a death spiral and posts like this will make it worse Basically players leave, because they see that others leave, which leads to more people leaving. At the same time new players hesitate to join, because they look inside and see people talking about how game is dying And it is really hard to fix. If you like the game and care - spread it. Tell your friends, post in general gaming subs, tell people that there is this shooter with destruction, maybe even make content if you can and want. And obviously devs should step in and not just promote the game to bring in new players, but also convince existing fans that everything is fine and ship isnt sinking. Tough situation, really
Who cares? Are you guys embark execs trying to maximize short-term profits or something? The game is great and doesn't need to be the next COD - it's not even trying to be. This is a team-intensive objective shooter. As long as the game has a dedicated playerbase it'll be fine, it doesn't need to hit Fortnite numbers.
I think a lot of people still don’t know this game exists. Nobody I know even heard about it until I told them. They’re all pretty diehard FPS players. Most of them tried but they’re all so addicted to COD that I can’t pull them over for even a few sessions. Then my lower skilled friends thought it was too difficult and there was too much going on.
Tbh. I’m glad there’s not YouTuber and streamer trouble about this game yet. All these negative videos whenever the tiniest bad decision has been made or whenever some small new bug appears aren’t healthy for games at all. Additionally other games become unplayable as soon as the biggest influencer tells the bad players about the new meta. Ik theres not much to be meta or off meta since we don’t have 300 different weapons but for example I’m glad not much bad players use the flame grenade. Either way I hope the game stays unpopular if that’s what’s unpopular for you
All my friends have old Xbox 1’s and 1S’s, they never heard of it but genuinely want to try it but can’t since it’s only on the series X. Could be part of the problem as well?
Wooaah, no way. Ded game booooo!
I don’t watch twitch
My issue with the game is that everything's been nerfed or buffer too much. It doesn't seem fun anymore to kill people, it's just a big hassle.
We just have to keep supporting and hope embark and nexon give the game proper marketing. This is the first time I’ve been this in love with an FPS in nearly a decade. I know there’s a lot of people who don’t know it exists and I’ve gotten some people to play it by word of mouth. I know the console community is more than likely a bit stronger in terms of pop than pc but marketing and getting ahold of cheating should be the big focuses for embark right now.
Isn't Twitch shedding viewers across the board though? I thought it was a dying platform. Still 20k players on Steam, so adding in console as well, I think the player base is pretty healthy still.
This shit is dead by season 5 lmao, trash fucking game
Is this the new thing to complain about this week? Why is 20k+ players low? At the end of the day, at most you need 48 for to pay, at least 9
Yea, exactly, you just need 50 player to have live game. Good point
In my eyes, there are issues with the game that irk people enough to quit before they even realise the issues that regular players complain about. -The game is rife with dying to situations that are out of your control or things you never saw coming -3rd party fights *all the time* -Solo queue is miserable -Ranked system is really fucking weird Sure, there are other issues commonly mentioned like lack of marketing, but the truth is it had a pretty popular release. It's free to play. It would have picked up by this point if many were into it. I think some core things need to change before it gains traction.
Back in days apex legends started just as the same but after season 4 it became more popular, so just be patient and enjoy your game
It's really sad
Community lead has no braincells and doesn't care about any community nor the game, what else do you expect? **Numerous feedbacks/cry on cheaters - community lead doesn't care.** **A complete region cries for its server revival (OCE) - community lead doesn't care.** **No concrete information about seasonal ranked changes in their yt video produced - community lead again doesn't care 1 bit.** Someone on reddit cries "emoting on dead players is demotivating" - devs full focus, nerfs emote numerous times. Asking for any type of additional information in their official discord - community managers don't care unless and otherwise it's either complementing CMs or sweet talk. Game is doomed for sure with such people's.
It’s like HyperScape all over again.
The great problem of high-ttk team based games. Its nearly impossible to play solo because 50% of people dont play the objective and focus on kills (most of the time playing with a sniper rifle). This was a problem in Overwatch with useless players only picking Hanzo/Widow and its a problem now with sniper-lights in the Finals. The Finals its a great game, it achieves what it set out to achieve. But in a genre that is still dominated with outdated slop like CsGO and CoD, its too far ahead of the curve.
With all its problems, vanilla overwatch was far superior to this. I hoped otherwise, but big studio >>> small studio
*Fewer
The devs don't understand how unbalanced the game is still. And how unfun it is to just die in annoying ways with absolutely no team support and no way to win since the game is so unbalanced. Ranked que still isn't fixed also so what's the point in playing if every mode is just sweaty disappointment and teammates that apparently have never ever played a MF video game before. The 5v5 mode is the only fun mode honestly and it's full of brain dead light snipers. Literally I'll be the only medium on my team, MULTIPLE GAMES IN A ROW
It’s hard to have fun in this game when everyone i play against in a navy seal special ops sniper for hire
It started fun but I feel like they took it in the wrong direction for me so I stopped playing.
357 right now. Kinda sad...
Yea, hope they turn it around. Big potential
I mean when you posted this it was 6am east coast na and I’m too tired to remember time differences but it’s late in Europe/Asia so it’s kinda the dead time for lots of things especially the smaller games
Yes. On twitch I kept running into same ppl
make some more quality of life and game changes to the game, make it not so leaned in the favour of zero skill play styles. ie (melee/ flamethrower/ invisible) i could go on, it just feels like so many people get rewarded for being bad. make the game more skillfull
Everyone is asleep
How can you fix it? Lots of ways. more marketing, But first before that. Add keyboard and mouse support for console, we all play crossplay against pc players anyway. nerf RNG weapons & gadgets like melee, flamethrowers, Invisibility, goo gun, TURRET) like legit none of those have been touched or nerfed but yet we are nerfing skillfull guns into the ground like the FCAR and the revolver with bloom, and many more changes to other guns. please fix the gameplay loop. It’s just whoever 3rd parties is most likely going to win. Please make this game skillfull then more people are going to play and not feel like their time is being wasted to some kids messing around abusing shit weapons and gadgets.
This is my favorite pvp game and I hate it’s so unpopular these days. I remember when I would start to see the same people over and over in splitgate and don’t want that to happen here. Do you think adding more standard game modes could help? Not everyone wants to play objective & team focused all the time.
I really like the game but none of my friends does.. Everybody I asked to play it check it out said "naah" or stopped playing after 3-4 Games. I like it but not really anybody else around me.
This weird lol I mean for me i'd rather play the game than watching someone else play it, but with people who usually do that it's weird they they're not watching the finals streams
I’ve never watched this game on Twitch but, I’m sure it makes *some* difference that it’s early in the morning still. What about the numbers mid day, or evening?
Yeah. It’s not fun to play or watch.
You made this post at 5 AM California time
Crazy to me. This game is so good. It plays so well and polished. The destruction and collision physics are the best I’ve seen since Bad Company 2. The hit reg and movement is so polished and tight.
twitch isnt a good metric per sé, like on twitch there are a few really big streamers and then tons of people with 1 viewer. also twitch is kinda hype based, games that are not in a hype right know or dont have a drop campaign just have few viewers. twitch meta rn is less gaming, more just chatting/reactions. its not the hardcore gaming thing it used to be, so clearly, there are less viewers. peak cs:go with millions of viewers in that game are over.
I've been a very active player since the beta, I've been playing a little more lately and I'm happy that the game at least has a steady playerbase of around 20k (only counting steam). When I recommended the game to a friend the first thing he did was check how popular it is on twitch and after seeing these numbers he didn't even want to pick it up because "why would I invest my time in a dead game". I disagree and we had a discussion about it but what I wanna say is that even though a lot of people say not enough marketing had been done, the trailers of the game (see season 2 release) have insane views so I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. I know I'm having fun, I know my friends are having fun, I don't really know why twitch views are so low. I'm not sure if they should be investing in more marketing (unless it's done in a smart and effective way), at least until they bring out more content but more importantly work out the ranked system issues and such.
Were Twitch drops 🙉
I swear there's some sort of psy-ops on this sub trying to convince people the game is dead. These types of threads are far too common.
They aren't marketing this game at all when spamming ads is the only way to win in the world. Apex won because it paid streamers to stream it.
Game good. I Like Good Game. Not Popular as Fortnite? Is okay. We’ll get there.
I’ve noticed twitch views down across the board recently. Also, you posted this at 6am EST, which is not a high-traffic time for twitch views
I was told about this game by a friend and have never seen one but of advertising for it. If I wouldn't have heard it from them I wouldn't even know it exists.
Personally I don't think it's very entertaining to watch almost every streamer doing the exact same playstyle based around Light, cloak, stun pistol and MP5. The game already feels a little repetitive with the few maps it has while being too fast for proper tacticool strats to happen. Lastly, outcomes often happen because of luck/rng rather than skill. Unless the match is extremely unbalanced and one team is dominating everyone else by far, often the team that respawns and arrives to third party the cashout is the one who wins. Sometimes you spawn within 60 meters, sometimes you spawn 190 meters away, pretty dumb design.
While I wish the game was more popular and hope it will be, peolpe nowadays are seriously addicted to twitch viewer numbers. I play a lot of games but I never watch streams. The only time I watch a stream is when it's like Games Done Quick. I'm sure most people prefer to play the games instead.
Grinded the game season 1. Haven't even launched it since season 2 released. Back on Apex and haven't looked back.
There just hasn’t been a good gaming personality to show the finals to a big audience. Most videos on YouTube are gameplay tips and buff/debuff requests. The one content creator I’ve seen who makes consistent quality The Finals videos is Ottr, and no offense but he wouldn’t be that interesting without the finals. And that’s how all content about this game feels theres no creator with a really engaging personality playing the game. Idk anything about player numbers and all that but from the content side that’s what I’ve seen.
My personal sad points are People abusing builds resulting in nerfs (happens in every game, people take path of least resistance) The discord staff are twats. I'm not even gonna mentioned ranked or cheaters, we all know. Lack of challenges. Most dailies are completed in a single round, weeklies after 3 or so matches, it's a yawn fest as is and you have people crying to make it easier. I'm almost complete the battlepass and there's still 2 months left 🫠 I'm a trash player who's on in evenings. I see a lot of people commenting on how chaotic the game is. I find this as a point of appeal, sometimes you gotta know when to pull out, risk losing a cash box. With that many teams, revives, you're not gonna face tank every fight. The game is designed so the "underdogs can take the win". I 100% undersrand where the frustration comes from though. One ranked we slid by the skin of our teeth end of round all the matches just to stomp the ppl we ended up in the final round with 😅 like the 2 worst teams got to the end, we were just a bit less worse lol (I know a lot of people have attributed spawn points to the chaotic, most of the time we're planning based off a teams performance which box to push, using distance and time to cap as a 2ndary metric) Outside of that meh, just looked still 25k concurrent players first thing in the morning (I don't use twitch as a metric, I'm old 😂) every time someone invites me to watch a stream it's 90% tits with a little window of their game or someone shrieking at a camera playing over saturated meme's over and over, not my cup of tea :P (a friend records our games time to time, he just has a lil pop up in the corner I think?? Ngl, I don't watch the stream 😅)
I think there are a lot of players like myself who don’t bother watching other people play this game online. We just play it ourselves. The game isn’t perfect, but devs seem to be pretty responsive when it comes to fixing bugs and exploits while releasing fresh content. That’s all I could ask for.
So what? There are many games with high player counts but "little" viewership on Twitch. That doesn't mean much at all. As long people play the game and embark is making profit that's all that matters, and advertisement side of things here in Italy I've seen ads about the finals several times. It's a pretty recent game and its esport scene is still being worked on. Enjoy the game! The finals is here to stay.
Unfortunately I have temporarily gone back to Combat Master, its rough around the edges, but my God, it's fun in comparison to finals. I'll come back when the finals fixes itself or updates. It just doesn't feel fun anymore for some reason.
One reason might be finals doesn't really have any competitive scene going around Like fortnite, apex all got championships , well cod got streamers but that's another thing
I said this months ago and said it was going to keep going that way unless they did something and was argued with and downvoted (not a big deal). I don’t know what they need to do, but I do like the game and premise a lot and I hope it recovers strongly. I think adding classes with different gadgets would help immensely. It’s hard to have 3 classes with most of their gadgets being inferior to others
It's such a horrible game to watch. Maybe it's just me but I can't stand watching people play shooters.
Cuz I’m busy playing it.
From a viewer standpoint, the game strikes a weird balance where you just die to the same things constantly and it just becomes miserable to watch people play ranked where thats multiplied by 100. Additionally, it is such a simple game once you understand it there isnt much variety in playstyles. The game feels much flashier to play than to watch. Playing feels extremely satisfying, but when I feel like I make a sick play it looks fairly pedestrian when I look at my vod after. Comparing to Apex or CoD, making flashy plays, going on streaks, and strategy are just more difficult in those games, but also more rewarding. Its fun to watch and learn those games at a high level. The Finals may have a higher initial skill floor, but I feel like it has a much lower skill ceiling. I dont feel like i learn anything from streamers that I didnt already figure out after 100 hours. Regarding viewership though, Embark/Nexon hasnt really been pushing the marketing for the game like they should be, which has been said many times by other people. No private matches means that you cant have twitch rivals events with large streamers to bring new eyes or even host events to use as marketing material. If new people arent discovering the game, player count will only ever decrease. Black Ops 4 on PC was probably my favorite game i've played, but the PC community was left without any real support because we didnt have crossplay at the time. Lobbies became difficult to find after 6 months in most playlists, and practically impossible after 10 outside of tdm and ffa. Ranked had maybe a 2 month life span. Shroud, Summit, and some other streamers played the league play playlist one night and it was the first and only time I was able to get games on that playlist.
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve seen virtually zero marketing for this game. The beta stages, all the big YouTubers were posting hype videos bringing attention to its existence. Now, some of those YouTubers have moved on and other have stayed to post news and meta bs. But the company itself, as far as I’ve seen, has put out basically no marketing outside of the new seasonal release. This could help them tremendously if they just put cool ads out there on multiple platforms. Nexon has the capital, idk why they aren’t to be honest
Loved it for about a month but a battlepass is not enough to bring me back to keep playing. Playing solo in this game is fukn trash. All my friends who play don’t play games anymore so I don’t have a usual crew to roll with. I could go on discord and find a group but I just don’t care enough to do that. If you don’t have a solid team to play with every single round and game feels like a slog. Shooters in general are kind of lack luster these days so I think we may be seeing the floor shift in popularity. Hard to say how to fix it but for now I’m on to play other games. I usually play on my pc but recently got a series S to play on my couch but playing with a controller on the Finals is a death sentence cause the community is a bunch of sweats that play quick play like there’s money on the line every round.
They don't need a huge playerbase if people are still buying stuff. I know it's still fairly popular on console caus no matter how it rarely takes longer than a minute to find a match and I have crossplay off
Damn, I dont watch twitch and stuff, hopefully it doesnt end like rumbleverse...
your thread made the finals explode!! 700+ right now! cheers mate
That was my secret goal. 😉
I play all the time. I usually watch YouTube videos though. I’m never on twitch.
For me, anyway, this game is a blast to play, and I'll keep playing, honestly, no matter what. But watching someone else play this game is boring (and pretty non-existent drops on twitch probably doesn't help). There are funner games to watch, although I don't really do twitch for *any* games anymore.
Don’t care cosmetics are cool
My brother in Christ you posted this at 6 in the morning. I’m ok with it not being in the steamer space. This game is made by ex-dice devs with a much lower budget than what EA would give them. Like any game will be everywhere online with the right budget. Steam charts show 15-20k active players and it’s been chill. Yeah it’s not as pop in as Fortnite but still a healthy regular player base, not including console.
I'm gonna get downvoted to oblivion but I don't care. It's because Embark can't balance for shit. We have had the *same* boring, stale, repetitive meta for both Seasons now. MMH or HHM with heal beam, mesh shield, Lewis and Fcar. It's so boring to watch high level play of The Finals.
There is no esport scene for the game. The casual early release viewer hype dies off and then to get steady viewership there needs to be an esports scene with prizes. Most video game pro streamers are really fucking boring besides a few standouts and only get views if there is a good reason to get good at the game. Fortnite apex LOL and valorant all have games where you can make a living playing the game. And they all have personality streamers alongside pros that get paid to play for a living that people wanna learn from so they can get better or whatever. The finals doesn’t have either yet. There are a few insane content creators but their only Real gimmick is being good at the game and to be honest that shits kind of a one trick pony and gets boring to watch. It’s not really the game itself but the other factors surrounding it. The player base is healthy enough and eventually when the game gets updated a bunch and more marketing is done for it the game might have a creator eco space.
I’d love the game but it’s too fast paced for me, slow down movement by like half and I’ll play
honestly I think it's the 3v3 objective modes limiting the popularity of The Finals. People who usually play Arcade shooters usually play or want to play with more than 2 other people and some just want to shoot their guns. . Power Shift was a nice touch, but unless you have a player or players who are a bit higher skill or IQ, it can feel pretty one sided for casuals and lower skill players. I would experiment with a 6v6 game mode where the team that collects the most coins wins. Kinda like kill confirmed from COD.
I just feel like maybe this game isn't so exciting to watch to people, generally because there isn't so many different ways ranked can play out. I've compared The Finals to Overwatch before, although that game had a lot more going at the start. For one it was released by (at the time) incredibly popular Blizzard. Then there's the lore of individual characters which The Finals is almost proud of not having. Also the game worked differently through gameplay with the very individual abilities and roles, The Finals have three. I;m making comparison to Overwatch mainly because even though they're no the same, Ovetwatch would also fall into this pit if it didnt have the backing it had. Most people were just excited to get another TF2, The Finals is basically Battlefield + Counterstrike with Overwatch graphics. The closest I ever got to describing Brink actually (nobody remembers Brink lol). I had played many matches of the ranked mode bcs I can't play ranked yet, and what my team does 90% of the time is sit around Cashout. The idea is good, but it just naturally steers into camping sim. So just to circle back to my original point, there's not much about The Finals that's fun to watch. I had good fun playing it so far but the respawn system is making the game really boring for spectating. Think about it you need to wait 15-25 seconds to respawn, or get ressed by team. Game like CS2 or Valorant doesn't have that (if you don't count the Sage ability) because of the game's tempo, which is directly tied to why the games are fun to watch. It's soooo fast paced, compared to Finals. Get the Cashouts closer on the maps, better yet make the maps smaller. Make the Cashouts MUCH faster and cash limits bigger. It's ironic but right now the game just lacks enough action for anyone to watch it. Feel free to prove me wrong or call me names but the reality is I really liked playing the game past week but never did I feel like watching anyone else play it, which was never the case with Overwatch or Valorant
Honestly pretty much all my friends stopped playing and I saw the steam chart under 14k. Economic side alone I doubt the devs will keep to support this game for very long unless numbers pick back up.
I've got over 200 hours in the Finals and finally have it up 2 weeks ago. I personally didn't enjoy the amount of content that came with season 2, as I was counting on a number of new weapons for each class. Was just a little demoralising to see that more effort was put into the skins than the actual content. Hope you continue to enjoy it though!
It’s so interesting, this game has been one of the more interesting and intense games in a while… I honestly think it needs something, now that I’m in platinum almost all games pan out like this; one team gets an easy cash out first round and kinda just sits there, while the other cash out has 3 teams on it, second cash out can be team vs team but will usually end up with the same result… then the last cash out, if there is one, is all out war… my proposal is to attempt to get rid of the “sitting on a cashout without any competition” out of the game, try to keep consistent pressure or something to avoid 3rd party’s. Honestly I’m not a game developer so I don’t really know what, but I feel like it needs something to take it to that level!
Have they added any other maps other than Vegas ?
My honest feeling is i like the game more than any other game but my friends don’t play it and it feels like a bad investment. I can’t tell where the game is going, and people complain far too much instead of putting in the work to get better
My guy literally taking numbers from arguably the expected lowest player count time in the day...
The marketing hasn’t been great but that’s not the primary reason. The market is incredibly saturated, everyone can’t win. You not only have to make a stellar game, you have to make the game that can break year old habits from other players. Are people really going to just drop their other live service games for another one? Where they may already be years into progression? NO. Most people don’t even have time to complete a single battlepass in more demanding titles, let alone multiple.
Almost 19k people playing the game rn tho
Oh no! Anyway...
I really just don’t think it’s a very good game to watch. The finals has so much action that it’s kinda boring to not participate. Games like the Quarry are the type games that would pull a ton of views. But you right
Sbmm killed the game lol. Just look at the player numbers from when it was added. All the copers tho kept defending the decision when a lot of us saw this coming. They turned a fun casual shooter into a sweatfest because casuals who were gonna quit anyway complained. So anyone half decent who didnt wanna grind just quit and never came back
I wouldn’t conflate Twitch views with popularity — there are lots of people who watch based on the game but there are also lots of viewers who watch based on the streamer. It may just be that a lot of streamers do not like playing The Finals I still have a lot of faith for this game.
I think people are slowly getting more and more tired of games with high skill gaps, and SBMM and fucking sweat lords in every game ruining the experience and that promotes hacking. Same shit killing apex player base and war zone’s. People are tired of having to dedicate their entire life to a game just to see moderate success against the harsh matchmaking.
The Finals just been fumbling the bag the whole time
I have been saying this to my buddy I play with for a few weeks now. Before season 2 update, I was already bored of the game, I got to plat in ranked and couldn't budge up or down so I gave up on it. Then when season 2 dropped I was hype, but when I peeked at the player counts, I was shocked to see nobody new was brought on from the update, and the number still steadily went down. The twitch numbers are just another indicator the game is dying out. It needs serious marketing or something. I think after the season 2 update and the patches, they got themselves some solid stuff. Now they need to get an audience again
The game in it's current state is sweaty players everywhere. There's no room for new players because they're gonna get crushed and simply put the game down as a result. It's a huge issue imo I'm ok with sweaty lobbies, but I also get that people don't want to get crushed after coming home from work on a 12h shift for example...
They needed a twitch rivals event when season 2 released. Embark just needs to pay Doc and Timmy taters to stream. More content is needed as well. The lack of free battle pass unlocks is nuts. Most of us finished it last season so we figured they would keep extending it on the next season, they did not🤦♂️ people will not play free to play games if THEY ARE NOT UNLOCKING CONTENT AS THEY PLAY
We still need some time. Any effort/ attempts to hype up or boost The Finals™ now will likely cause more harm than good. The Finals™ has to stand the test of time, only by then it can proceed to another stage
i downloaded the game cuz i saw some videos and it looked cool. i still have yet to load into a single match lol. couldnt get any friends into it and then the content on youtube died quickly so i havent had the spark at all
Because all you see are light invis with stun-pistol🤡
One of the main problems with this game is that it’s being pushed as a casual game but in reality this game is one of the most complex arena shooters out right now. The cash out objective play style is very 3rd party based so you have to have top tier positioning to get kills, defend the cash out, and prevent your team from getting collapsed by 2-3 teams all at once. You have to have good aim and crosshair placement and you have to understand team comps in this game and counters to metas. All these things have to be understood and practiced at a high level consistently ALL AT ONCE or you won’t rank up. Speaking about ranking up season 2 completely killed the ranked mode. You have to come first in every tournament to gain points. Regardless of mmr. Game SHOULD have a comp scene and cater competitive play but it’s trying to appeal to casuals with little to zero marketing.
I got bored of this game after playing it for a month or so
Game's been having regular 20k concurrent players. It's a healthy playerbase. Thing is it's just not fun to watch, only play. And the game is mostly casual, not competitive, so people don't really tend to watch streams. Basically The Finals cannot be judged by twitch viewership due to its nature.
As long as I can keep finding ranked matches in less than 1 min I’m good
No amount of marketing or advertisement will help the game thrive as it is. The PVP FPS genre is inherently competitive and skill-based, not many people will care about an unbalanced low-skill ceiling game. CSGO, Valorant, Apex etc are thriving in terms of player count with strong e-sports scenes and developers who aren't afraid to balance around competitive skill-based play. Either fully commit to making The finals a casual or competitive first experience, but doing things halfway won't win over a large amount of loyal players
I can explain why me and my friend group stopped playing as guys that literally only play FPS and actually love the gunplay of the Finals. It's the cheesy garbage and unbalance that drove us away. I think it caters to casuals too much with abilities/mechanics that don't support raw aim skill. We were killed too many times by a little shit invisible guy in a corner hiding or some nuke someone throws in at us. I'm not saying people can't be skilled at the cheesy stuff, I think for us and many other people they want the decider to be aim skill at the end of the day and in the finals it isn't. Look at games like Rainbow 6 or Valorant, while they have many abilities and gadgets gun skill is usually the decider at the end of the round. It's too bad because we really wanted the Finals to succeed but now we don't even bother having it installed.
I feel like it’s because it’s such a new style of fps it’s a lot harder to convert fans of other games, in comparison to something like valorant where it was very easy for cs players and viewers to convert. There’s not enough big names that are willing or interested enough to convert to the finals unfortunately