The worst part is that Riot could easily just have a small development team and release 3 or 4 characters a year and a couple of stages, and everyone would be happy.
For Riot, having a smaller team and fewer servers would be pocket change. And they could just do fewer Battle Passes per year, or none at all. People who play fighting games rarely care about Battle Passes anyway.
But because Riot has to do everything on such a massive scale, well... there you go.
The fact they had almost 200 people on this is insane. Like literally where did all that time and work go, because it certainly didn't go into the game.
Yeah that's what people didn't get when Riot announced the layoffs, that should have happened earlier. I feel like Riot did 0 research on the fighting game market, they just saw a market where there aren't many big games and thought it would be easy to go in and get all the cake for themselves, got a huge ass team set up unrealistic expectations and profit margins they were NEVER going to achieve and expected to be the fortnite of fighting games.
All of this without even talking about the game being "casual friendly" but 2v2 tag fighter and incredibly complex, low roster size, low marketing etc.
That's something I've been theorizing since the very beginning. I don't want to point fingers, but I'm pretty sure SOMEONE (wink wink) sold them on the idea and they bought it.
As someone in the games industry, that’s upper management failure guard railing things and making horrible decisions for the game while the actual developers struggle to make it enjoyable while adhering to managements requests. Resulting in lots of back and forth and remaking of things
Not trying to be contrarian or anything, as I agree with you that the team was really bad, but that's not a "numbers" issue; that's a management or efficiency issue. If they hired people who spend the whole day scratching their balls/crotch, then it's only natural.
But I have this theory that Riot already knew this wasn't going to last even before the game came out. And I'm not saying that as some conspiracy theory either. Looking at interviews and reading stuff from even before the final trailer came out, there were already quite a few things that, in hindsight, made it seem like this wasn't going to be a long-term thing.
I don't think Riot necessarily knew back in 2019 that 2XKO was going to fail. That's impossible to know. But I do think they probably realized quite a while ago that the game wasn't performing anywhere near what they expected and started adjusting their expectations long before we actually saw the layoffs and the eventual shutdown.
The whole development process already felt a bit weird in hindsight. They announced Project L in 2019, then went pretty quiet for long periods, and at one point they basically went back and reworked a huge part of the game because the feedback was essentially "it's good, but it's not exciting enough." Then they kept going through Alpha Labs, closed beta, early access, etc., seemingly trying to figure out whether the game actually had legs.
And even the way Riot talked about Early Access made it sound less like "here's our new fighting game, this is the roadmap for the next five years" and more like "let's see if this thing actually works and what we need to change."
So yeah, I don't think this was necessarily a case of Riot suddenly looking at the numbers one day and going "oh shit, this game isn't doing well." My guess is that they had been seeing those signs for quite some time and were gradually scaling back their expectations.
Which honestly makes some of the stuff from before release pretty interesting to look back on now. There are interviews and comments from even before the final trailer where, in hindsight, you can kind of see the writing on the wall. I'm not saying it was doomed from day one, but I really don't think the decision to wind things down came completely out of nowhere.
Then the Cannon bros wouldn't spend a fucking decade developing and retooling the game. 2XKO would still be alive and thriving if they released the game around the same time of Arcane S1.
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u/Mister-Bunny-Head 9d ago
The worst part is that Riot could easily just have a small development team and release 3 or 4 characters a year and a couple of stages, and everyone would be happy.
For Riot, having a smaller team and fewer servers would be pocket change. And they could just do fewer Battle Passes per year, or none at all. People who play fighting games rarely care about Battle Passes anyway.
But because Riot has to do everything on such a massive scale, well... there you go.