THE FINALS

Autopsy Report

Every wall can be destroyed. Every floor can collapse. Every ceiling can cave in. For the first ten hours, THE FINALS feels like the future of competitive shooters. For the next hundred hours, it feels like a tech demo with a battle pass. That gap — between a brilliant feature and a sustainable game — is where 233,000 players disappeared.

THE FINALS launched during The Game Awards in December 2023 with the kind of shadow drop that marketers dream about. No one saw it coming. Within days, 243,000 people were playing simultaneously, drawn by word-of-mouth videos of buildings collapsing on opponents, floors being blown out beneath cashout stations, and the sheer physics-driven chaos that no other shooter offered. Embark Studios — founded by former DICE developers who built Battlefield’s destruction — had created something genuinely new. The reviews reflected it: 78% positive from 263,935 reviewers. People liked THE FINALS. They really did.

They just didn’t keep playing it.

Two years and four months later, 9,521 concurrent players remain — a 96% decline from peak. The 495 minutes of average playtime in the last two weeks (about 8 hours) means the surviving community is genuinely engaged, but the population is a fraction of what a free-to-play competitive shooter needs to thrive. Queue times are long. Matchmaking is loose. The game-show atmosphere — designed for packed arenas and roaring virtual crowds — feels increasingly hollow when the actual audience has left the building.

The problem is structural, not qualitative. Destructible environments are a feature, not a game. The first time you blow a hole in a wall to flank an enemy team, it’s exhilarating. The twentieth time, it’s routine. The hundredth time, you start to notice what’s missing: a ranked mode with genuine stakes, a meta-game deep enough to theory-craft, a competitive scene worth following, a reason to log in tomorrow that isn’t “the same chaos as yesterday but on a different map.” THE FINALS had the most innovative single feature in competitive shooters since Apex Legends’ movement system. But Apex backed its movement with deep legend design, evolving meta-game, and a battle royale format that creates natural narrative tension. THE FINALS backed its destruction with… more destruction.

Embark’s seasonal updates addressed breadth but not depth. New maps, new game modes, new cosmetics — the standard live service cadence. But adding more arenas to destroy doesn’t solve the problem of destruction losing its novelty. The game needed systemic evolution: meaningful ranked play, destruction that created strategic depth rather than just visual spectacle, social features that built communities. Instead, each season felt like a fresh coat of paint on the same impressive but ultimately shallow foundation.

The competitive shooter market is the most unforgiving in gaming. Valorant, Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and Fortnite are all free, all polished, and all offer competitive depth that rewards thousands of hours of mastery. In this arena, being “fun” is table stakes. THE FINALS was fun — 78% of 263,935 reviewers confirmed it. But fun without depth is a vacation destination, not a home. Players visited THE FINALS, had a great time, and went back to the games they actually lived in.

Key Failure Factors

• Feature, Not a Game: Destructible environments are THE FINALS’ defining innovation and its fatal limitation. Destruction creates spectacle, but spectacle has diminishing returns. By hour twenty, the novelty is gone, and what remains is a competent but unremarkable team shooter.

• Live Service Without Systemic Evolution: Seasonal updates added new maps and modes but never deepened the core experience. More arenas to destroy isn’t depth — it’s repetition with variety. The game needed ranked play that mattered, destruction with strategic consequences, and community-building features.

• Overcrowded F2P Shooter Market: Competing for attention against Valorant, Apex, OW2, CS2, and Fortnite — all free, all deep, all with established competitive identities — is a war of attrition that THE FINALS was never equipped to win.

• Positive Reviews Masked a Retention Crisis: 78% positive sounds healthy. But 96% player decline reveals the gap between “this is fun” and “this is my game.” Liking something and committing to it long-term are fundamentally different behaviors.

Lessons for Developers

1. A great feature needs a great game underneath it. Destructible environments were genuinely innovative — no other shooter does it at this level. But innovation in one axis can’t compensate for mediocrity in every other axis. The meta-game, the competitive infrastructure, the social systems, and the long-term progression all need to be excellent in a live service shooter.

2. Positive reviews don’t predict retention. THE FINALS proves that players can genuinely enjoy a game and still not make it their long-term competitive home. Track retention metrics alongside sentiment. A game with 80% positive reviews and 96% churn has a depth problem, not a quality problem.

3. In the F2P shooter market, good-not-great is a death sentence. When Valorant, Apex, and CS2 are all free, merely fun shooters are sampled and discarded. Differentiation must be in competitive depth, not just a tech feature that wears off after ten hours.

4. Build the 100th hour, not just the first. THE FINALS is fantastic for the first few sessions. Ask what the player is doing at hour 100, and the answer is “the same thing they did at hour 10, but less impressed.” Long-term games solve the 100th-hour problem before launch.

Related Deaths

• Hyper Scape — Ubisoft’s innovative F2P shooter that launched to genuine buzz and died to indifference when the novelty of its verticality gimmick wore off.
• Splitgate — Portal-based shooter with a brilliant gimmick that generated massive launch interest but couldn’t convert novelty into long-term commitment.
• XDefiant — Ubisoft’s F2P shooter that launched into the same overcrowded market and bled players despite solid fundamentals.
• Knockout City — Dodgeball-based multiplayer game that was genuinely fun and still couldn’t sustain a player base in the F2P market.