First Person Shooter games, also known as FPS games have been around for a while but are decreasing in popularity. This is a category of games that has the player in first person while shooting a weapon. Call of Duty or Counter Strike Global Offensives have been around for years now and they still have a player base, but newly released FPS games are only getting attention for a couple of weeks then quickly losing 95% of their player base.

RHS Sophomore Ethan Alsip stated,”I think the main reason is because people are still looking for a new take on Call of Duty or other FPS games when they should be looking for something new.” Alsip explains that people like to buy new games, but they need to try something different than what they are used to. Many people who play video games might fear of missing out on a generational game that takes the world by storm.

When looking at games like The Finals, which was released on the December 7, 2023 it had a huge peak of 242,619 players in the game at once. Soonly after two months it is now at 24,346 players in the game. The reason for this huge difference isn’t because the game is awful, it’s because people weren’t feeling the nostalgic factor that Call of Duty or CSGO gives us.

Another example of an FPS game that died out is Split Gate. Released on May 24, 2019, it didn’t start popular but due to hacking in Call of Duty the player base got tired of getting killed by people who have aimbot so they went to find a new game and that new game was Split Gate. At its peak, it had 67,724 concurrent players on August 8, 2021, and only a year later it had a player count of 1,000. 

the reason for this huge decrease wasn’t because of the nostalgic factor, the problem was the game. Split Gate wasn’t made to support the massive number of people playing the game at once, so there was a wait time. People would have to wait for hours just to get into the lobby. If this wasn’t an issue, this game could have easily beaten The Finals player peak.

Due to players not feeling the nostalgic factor and these new games aren’t able to support the player count, FPS are slowly losing popularity in the gaming community. Good examples of this problem are games like The Finals and Split Gate. If we don’t begin to give these games a chance, we will soon be playing the same group of FPS games for the rest of our lives.