A wildly popular beta has skyrocketed The Finals into the top-wishlisted game on Steam, priming it to be the FPS to watch in 2024

pcgamer.com:

The hottest game on Steam right now is an FPS that's not technically out yet. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying out The Finals, a highly-destructible competitive shooter from ex-Battlefield devs currently in open beta.

The beta is so popular, in fact, that The Finals has claimed the top spot on Steam's top wishlisted games, beating out longtime juggernauts like Manor Lords, Hades 2, Ark 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. The Finals has hovered among the top 20 wishlisted games for about a year now, but its rise to the top happened all at once. An influx of 200,000 enthusiastic players will do that, though it also helps that several games that previously dominated the list, like Starfield, Atomic Heart, and Party Animals, all released in 2023.

It's also a potent reminder that there's an unending appetite for great shooters. Many FPSes come and go without making a big impact, but The Finals has a decent chance to stick around, depending on its post-launch support. This year's BattleBit Remastered sold two million copies in two weeks and still has a steady playerbase, but in past years, Hyper Scape, The Cycle: Frontier, and most recently Sega's Hyenas shut down early into their lives.

We're still very much in the honeymoon phase with The Finals—players are excited and inspired by its slick gunplay, skill-based movement, and jaw-dropping destruction tech that just works. It's a lot of fun with friends. Inevitably, though, the shine around The Finals' strong fundamentals will wear, and common complaints or requests will rise to the surface. Server instability is a big one right now, though Embark has made it clear this beta is a legitimate stress test for their servers, so that's to be expected.

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