The Finals' Playercount Is Exploding After Surprise Game Awards ...

The Finals

While I have many, many issues with last night’s Game Awards, one admittedly cool thing that happened was that after much speculation about when it would actually arrive, Embark Studio’s The Finals surprise launched during the show after previous limited time tests.

The Finals is a destruction-based game show-like multiplayer game that feels like a true breath of fresh air in the f2p shooter genre full of battle royales and extraction games. The aesthetic is great, the action is intense, the destruction physics are unrivaled. I played this in early testing more than a year ago, and I knew it was something special. Now that it’s here, the game is already starting to blow up and is on its way to potentially being a significant force in the space.

As I write this, The Finals is reaching higher and higher playercount totals. Right now it just crossed 200,000 concurrent players, the seventh most played game on Steam (it’s also on console). It’s still rising, given the fact that it dropped at close to 11 PM ET last night, and obviously it was going to start scooping up more and more players today as news gets out that it’s actually live.

Steamdb

Its Twitch viewership, in contrast, is still lagging behind. Despite 200,000 players it only has 20,000 viewers, outside the top 25 on the site. Though I would be extremely surprised if that persisted over the long term.

The Finals has run into some measure of controversy in one area, the fact that it was revealed that it was using AI voicework for its announcers in order to cast the action of the game. Here’s what I reported the developer saying a while back on the issue:

“They say that the technology is “far enough in terms of quality,” that it saves them supposed months of voicework to be able to record lines for new additions to the game within hours (and of course, they save money not paying actual voice actors). They also say that if there’s any sort of glitchiness or weirdness to it, well that plays into their weird game show world they’ve made.”

They went on to say their goal is not to replace voice actors “isn’t the end goal” for Embark, and I suppose we can hope that with the game live they might be able to go back and use actual actors for these parts, because “good enough” is not really good, when you really listen to how weird they often sound. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

It’s also an issue I doubt most players will notice, and the gameplay is going to be what attracts the most attention. I do believe that this is going to be a major player in the shooter space in short order, and I’ll keep checking back on its progress, in between playing myself, of course.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.