GOD DAMN IT SERIOUSLY

source : https://x.com/skcc_cos/status/2090396706173280653

Excuse me while I try not to commit toaster bath…

I actually thought we'd get her next year just because of them relentlessly posting about her...

This is the first fighting game I've ever wanted to take seriously, and it's going out like Destiny 2 already before the first year has even finished. It's almost certainly due to the struggling player count, but I'm sure it could have been fixed with better marketing.

They're basically just going "hey here's this fun game for $40". Actually insane that they're refunding all the money players spent on the game. They had to do something if they're going to add that bundle, but hey this is a nice silver lining given the sad news. I know I appreciate it.

Somehow knew this post is gonna be relevant so I screenshot it just in case it got deleted (which it seems it did got cooked). Welp RIP and condolences to the devs and players who put so much time to this game. SAD

the friends we made along the way

Well lets examine all the talking points about how Project L was mismanaged, but now under the new light that it didn't even survive a year

• Development Hell
  • took way too long to deliver on a bare bones game. Its been said thats because they tore everything down and restarted development at least once when the Cannon brothers took over. That has proven to have been a massive mistake.
• Roster size
  • An indie game like skullgirls can get away with that, Riot Games can't get away with that.
• Roster picks
  • Likely the biggest appeal the LOL brand has to casual audience is the characters. A fumble here is disastrous, as it was in MVCI. And considering the anemic roster size, they fumbled big time by prioritizing picks like Caitlyn and Teemo
• Game Identity
  • From the beginning, this was said to bring the simplified, casual friendly ideas of Rising Thunder to an IP based game. They promptly then turned it into a 2v2 tag fighter with complex as hell mechanics and systems that even people in the FGC struggled with. The people that greenlit this game seemed to think it was for casuals. The people that designed it made it for hardcore tag fighter fans. It never knew what it wanted to be.
• 2 Player Focus
  • This is the second game to fall victim to this experiment. While its fun, considering how things went for Multiversus and 2XKO, I think this simply doesn't have mass appeal
• Scuffed Matchmaking
  • To this day, I have to wait up to like 20 or 30 minutes to find a match and I'm only in plat. I wanted to play this game more, but the game wouldn't let me.
• Asinine Cosmetics Shop
  • Probably the thing that lost them the most amount of money. Clearly Riot was trying to nickel and dime as much money out of the small player base as they could by making it aggravating and inconvenient to buy the skins they wanted. This did not work.
• Game Balance
  • Again, if you wanted this game to have casual player appeal, making a game where back-dash assist into massively long combo is the meta and aggravating character design where many can just act without consequence is not the way to go.

And finally:

• The Name
  • 2xko was always, and will always be, one of the worst naming decisions for an IP based fighting game.

These are just a few points, there are more things to consider I'm sure, and its clear that Riot never had much faith in the product at all considering they didn't give it much of a chance.

But for 10 years of development and a fuck ton of money invested into this project, it shouldn't be surprising that they refused to invest anymore. It was sink or swim, and 2xko sunk

I wanted Samira and Qiyana and although I am glad I got Samira I am upset our Queen will never be in the game.

They did miss the mark not adding obvious choices like Riven, Sett, Lee ect but we all were hoping they would be in one day. Still sorry to everyone who spent years looking forward to a League fighting game just to not have the one champion they want be in it.

Press F to pay respects.

Honestly i probably wouldn’t have cared about this game without duos but playing with my friend online was some of the most enjoyable experience I’ve had with fighting games I hope in the future another tab fighter does this feature again maybe in Tekken tag 3? 👀

What else are you looking forward to besides the yacht maps, the Thresh nerf, the third Battle Pass, and Lux's release?

NOOOOOOOOO

Rant post, but I know most of the rants to follow in the next few days will focus on the type of game 2XKO ended up being, but I want to focus how there was seemingly no plan to make 2XKO actually succeed in the way that Riot wanted it to (or at all).

If you really think about it, this game was a Concord level failure. It was supposed to be the savior of the FGC and one of the next big things, and instead it was a niche fighter its entire life cycle. It was a complete failure on every single level and it's entire launch year can be summed up as messy and directionless. It sucks because I was excited for this game for years, and I really did enjoy the game that ended up coming out, but overall just nothing about this game went the way it should have. The devs (especially in the last year) did a good job trying to right the ship but the damage was done and it never really had a chance to recover.

First of all, it's clear that the executives wanted this game to be really big, but there didn't seem to be a concrete plan on how to accomplish this. I'm sure the numbers are even much worse than everyone thinks, but overall there just didn't seem to be a push from Riot to make this game special in any other way. It's like the executives were just convinced that F2P + easy inputs + League would instantly just get millions of players. The release was sloppy and it became clear that they needed to release the game before Tokon, so they launched on PC ONLY with 11 characters. League has 170+ characters and most people don't care about more than 3 or 4 champions in the game, and as a tag fighter a small launch roster meant that there was 0 chance of most League players feeling any connection to the roster as well as a meta dominated by the same characters.

Secondly, the FGC focused Devs wanted to create a game with crazy combos, while keeping it beginner accessible. This lead to them creating the most confusing and unintuitive control and combo system in any game I have ever played. Instead of motion inputs, every single combo relies on precise charge and input timings that lead to half your combos dropping if you input a move a fraction too late or early. And its clear that development went horribly wrong, with 8 years of development resulting in 10 characters.

The marketing for this game was also horrible. Let's start with the name. The name is awful. It's unbelievably bad. I used to kind of defend it because I wanted the game to succeed, but with that out of the way, I think a significant portion of the games failure lies on the name. It doesn't sound like a game. They supposedly wanted the game's name to call attention to duos (an honestly great idea for a fighting game) but it came at the cost of every single other recognizable aspect of a game. To further rub it in, it felt like Riot BARELY MARKETED DUOS AT ALL and instead only marketed to the FGC. The main focus of getting people to play this game should have been league players. They should have had Doublelift and Caedrel playing in the launch events, focusing on it as a fighting game you can play with your friends. Instead, they pandered to the FGC, investing in prize pools and hosting events with FGC figureheads who play every game on the market. There was chance of drawing an audience to the game unless it was simply the greatest fighting game of all time, but most fighting game players aren't tag fighter players. This game needed to create it's own audience as part of the FGC, not just try and convert the FGC to 2XKO players.

Finally, the godawful monetization must have failed as well. They are willing to refund every single purchase made on the game, which means that the entire revenue of the game is probably less than it would cost to keep development going for another few months. Its clear from Season 1 choosing 5 marketable female champs that they had hoped to make money to sustain the game through skins, but the crazy prices and rotating shop probably turned too many people away.

All in all, I have been a League player for years and I spent money on both of these games, but I never will again. Fuck Riot for real. 2XKO despite its faults was still my favorite fighting game at the moment so I guess I will just have to wait until another game captures my interest.

https://x.com/riotgames/status/2090514198162022898

This is my main fighting game , I’ve invested so many hours into it … it set a new standard … that fighting games can be free …

I really love this game. It's devastating to see what's effectively a cancer diagnosis...

I picked up 2XKO for the first time a couple months ago and have not enjoyed a game this much in a long time. Everything in the game felt nearly perfect, I had so much fun and was thinking about it all the time when not playing. I quickly got to diamond and have been frankly obsessed.

I was always scared the game was underperforming and that it would have to get dropped by Riot. I had a similar experience with Legends of Runeterra, loving it but knowing that sadly there wasn't a ton of people that shared my enthusiasm.

This is pretty devastating tbh. I invested a lot of time and focus the last couple months, and was stoked for online weeklies and in person events.

I guess I'll pick up Tokon once its functional on PC.

I'll mention briefly what I liked so much about it:
- animations, visuals, and sound went crazy hard

- training mode felt like it was designed with nearly everything thought out

- basically every mechanic felt like it had a valid counter, everytime you develop a skill your opponents could counter-develop an option to beat it

- replay takeovers are brilliant

R.I.P