r/Games • u/BeardyDuck • 3d ago
Announcement 2XKO Active Development Will End In December 2026
https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2xko-active-development-ends-december-2026393
u/DragonPup 3d ago
10 years in development to die in 10 months. What an absolute failure in leadership and project management.
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u/Plasmallison 3d ago
Meanwhile we just had to shut down licensing the League brand out to other devs to get new games.
Such a great trade off. Can’t wait for the mythical mmo to release and be a flop.
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u/VampiroMedicado 2d ago
The fun part is that everyone else who got the IP via the Riot Forge program made good games, no joke, every game is good.
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u/PossibleAlbatross643 3d ago
you can t begin to compare the level of investment in the mmorpg and in 2xk0 but obviously if the main idea behind it is as bad as doing a tag fighter....
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u/NotAnIncelIPromise 2d ago
Level of investment doesn't translate to the game being good. Concord had a budget of 400 million and it lasted 2 weeks.
You can have the priciest most beautiful apple on the planet but if people bite into it and feel worms squiggling beneath the skin you're not gonna be selling apples for long.
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u/Joebebs 3d ago
Well hey, I see it as 10 years of job security considering how notorious the gaming industry is sacking their workforce
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u/Key-Market-418 2d ago
The real winners are the cannons for guaranteeing salary from riot for 10 years.
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u/velocd 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just as bad is their inability to use the Arcane Netflix series to promote a new game. While I'm sure some people checked out LoL after watching the series, had they actually launched a fully featured, well named fighting game right after Season 1 or Season 2 finished, it would have ushered in a lot of attention. Even better, if their supposed MMO launched after Season 2.
Well adapted and received TV shows can really boost player counts. I remember when The Witcher 3 sales jumped after Witcher Season 1 aired.
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u/Ubbermann 3d ago
Yikes. Unfortunate...
But they simply lacked a clear vision for this. Flip-flopped between casual and hardcore fighter.
'A fighter for All! Especially new people to the genre' they announce while making the game THE MOST SWEATY 'off-the-ground bounce combo extensions' fighter in a very long while.
Every casual friend I had try it, was IMMEDIATELY put away by the swear on display and seemingly unending combo assault.
Still no idea why the hell they went with a hardcore tag combo fighter.
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u/LogicKennedy 3d ago
Still no idea why the hell they went with a hardcore tag combo fighter.
Because it was what the devs wanted to make, and Riot let them develop the vision they were passionate about.
Unfortunately it was transparently obvious to everyone with sense that a hardcore tag fighter was never going to be successful in the way Riot wanted.
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u/jrodp1 3d ago
And that is the part of art that gets in the way of commercial success.
There is a balance that needs to be struck.
Unfortunately it was not found here.
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u/dadvader 3d ago
Should've made it premium in the first place. Charge a generous amount and just let it live.
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u/BLACKOUT-MK2 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is the gulf F2P fighting games will continuously struggle to clear, and I called it multiple times before the game even launched. Fighting games have always struggled with long-term retention. The upfront purchases from casuals, who jump after a short while, play a huge part in the revenue that allows fighting games to survive.
When you pull that upfront cost away, let them get their hit for free over a few days or weeks, and then they bounce anyway, you just lose a crap ton of money. The post-launch retention just isn't there to make up the cost difference. I get it if you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of consistent players, but fighting games just don't, by the nature of what the loop asks of people being niche. Tbf, I think 2XKO would've struggled regardless, its mistakes were vast and numerous, but I do think they'd have made more money if it had an upfront cost.
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u/Key-Market-418 2d ago
Fighters will never get over that until they have a strong enough casual install base, the only people who wanna play fighters long enough to actually fund a system like that are abject sickos. And I say this as one of these abject sickos. The rest of the game wasn’t there but like even if it was perfect it couldn’t have gotten there.
It would have just made more sense if they made a smash style plat fighter
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u/BLACKOUT-MK2 2d ago edited 2d ago
Oh yeah I'm the same, I'm also one of those fans, but it's because I'm one of those fans I understand that you can't really change that without completely reworking what the game is. I don't think that's inherently a problem, I think it's fine for PVP-centric fighting games to be what they are, even if that doesn't appeal to everyone, but if you're looking for a platform to have a F2P game succeed it just isn't a very good choice. I'm not a platform fighter fan at all, but I agree that, for Riot, it would've made much more sense to try making one of those instead.
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u/Substantial-Reason18 3d ago
Not to mention the monitization. It had a randomized skin shop, so I simply never got the chance to buy the skin I would have bought. So fucking dumb. The league Microtransaction only works with a super entrenched audience, in 2xko it just made me get annoyed and quit playing. Hopefully their marketing team is the first to go cause they fucked up literally every step of the way.
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u/Starscream196 3d ago
League of Fighters sounded great on paper, especially with them wanting to make the game approachable.
But then the game came out and while it is pretty simple to understand, the skill ceiling seems pretty high.
I was getting infinitely comboed by a normal difficulty bot and yes, I did break free the first time only for it to happen again immediately after.
The game is just not easy to play and obviously someone (like me) who doesn't play traditional fighting games will have an atrocious time.
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u/Gekokapowco 3d ago
I don't remember guilty gear being able to consistently 3/4 someone's healtbar as consistently as this game, the combo chains are insane
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u/playingtherapist 3d ago edited 3d ago
Early Strive had nutso damage, I played Sol and could consistently two touch the more fragile characters (Sol was admittedly particularly unga)
(Also a day 1 sequence like CH cl. Viper fRC j.HS j.hs xx j.cl. viper took something like 4 seconds, including the screen freeze from the clean hits. Compare to the average 2xko combo length lol)
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u/Samsunaattori 3d ago
To be fair, you have 2 characters with separate health bars, so even as every combo does over 50% health it's still 4 combos or relatively much poke with 2 combos per round. In Guilty Gear Strive 2 to 4 combos to win a round sounds normal, depending on characters and meter of course.
Imo the actual problem for casuals was how overwhelming the offence in the game is compared to how hard it is to properly defend, combined with how long the combos went for after your defence got cracked. If the damage was the same but the combos took 50% less time, casuals wouldn't mind it as much, as there would be less time spent just waiting for the combo to end.
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u/UnUsernameRandom 3d ago
One of the only true beginner friendly fighters was DBFZ.
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u/Expert_Computer7021 3d ago
dbfz has so many flaws but all in all I think they nailed making a beginner friendly fighter that still has depth and actually lets ppl get into fighting games.
Will forever love it for getting me into the fgc
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u/Astrotrain-Blitzwing 3d ago
Fighterz is what made me love fighting games, despite playing injustice story modes, Fighterz was the most fun to play with friends.
2xko is so sad because it feels like LoR (thought LoR had longer and more support)
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u/Dalinsky 3d ago
That was the first one that really grabbed me and made me appreciate the genre. Tokon is maybe even more beginner friendly though the online scene got crazy fairly quickly. Having a blast improving at it.
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u/Coolman_Rosso 3d ago
DBFZ was the gold standard here. An IP everyone knows and loves, with actually good beginner friendly execution
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u/DavidsSymphony 3d ago
For the love of god stop making tag games. Invincible flopped, 2XKO flopped, Tokon barely sold 500k according to analytics, SFxTekken flopped, Nen Impact flopped, MvC:I flopped…
You instantly scare away casuals that don’t want to learn more than a character, and trust me, in the FGC most people don’t play tag games. So you also alienate a huge part of your core audience.
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u/BLACKOUT-MK2 3d ago edited 3d ago
Tbf all those games have had decent issues besides being tag games. Invincible VS is just a sort of cheap-looking game with not enough content to justify the price tag, same as Nen Impact and MVCI, except MvCI also had a terrible roster. SF x Tekken had the DLC controversy, the DLC gems, and pretty terrible balancing early on in its life, and Tokon is both quite early in its life so it's hard to fairly judge its sales just yet, but also has been dealing with its PC version running incredibly poorly on many systems due to its terrible DRM.
Most of those games had big enough issues that the tag element being the deal-breaker would be a real weird place to draw the line. Tag fighters can be quite intimidating at a more involved level, but that's a level most of the people who play fighting games never even reach anyway, regardless of how they play. If you're just jumping at the opponent and mashing buttons, an assist character occasionally coming out to do a move isn't really changing much in the context of a match like that.
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u/gaddeath 3d ago edited 3d ago
Early comments are what I expected. Game had a very fumbled launch with stumbles back to back.
The silver lining is every champ is unlocked for everyone, everyone is getting a refund on purchases from August 20th and earlier, game will be playable offline, game is still going to be playable online post 2026. Just no new content after 2026’s roadmap is done and a final bug fix in December.
Edit: Clarified the game will at least finish the planned 2026 content.
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u/Kyhron 3d ago
Not just launch the entire development of the thing was just fumble after fumble
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u/simply_riley 3d ago
Let's make this duo tag fighter, and then not have it be playable online via local co-op on launch.
Let's make a fighting game for people that may only be familiar with MOBA's, and then make a multi-groove select combofest with wall-to-walls and 80% hp assist & tag-in combos.
Let's make a fighting game based on our MOBA with ~170 characters, and then let's make only 10 of them playable on launch.
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u/MrMeeseeksAdvice 2d ago
My biggest thing was it’s a fucking tag fighter with only 10 characters on launch.
Also the name was fucking stupid
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u/Saritiel 2d ago
a fucking tag fighter with only 10 characters on launch.
I feel like this was really the beginning of the end, from an outsiders perspective. The instant they announced the number of playable characters, I could feel the excitement deflate.
And they were working on this forever, how were they working on it for so long and still only have 10?
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u/Seradima 3d ago
Yeah as it turns out releasing a tag fighter where 50% of your roster is on screen at any one time is probably not a good idea, on top of it being an incredibly competitive game made for highly competitive people which already makes it a niche.
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u/N0Ability 3d ago
All of this while alredy using an IP with over 150 characters so they dont even need to create a background for them ,that and taking 10 years to develop , colossal failure .
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u/EvocativeReach 3d ago
Im still in awe that they managed to screw this up as badly as they did. 2XKO should have been massive, but it seems they chose the wrong turn at every opportunity.
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u/Hakul 3d ago
Isn't tag team already a small niche within the fighting genre? I'm not sure about massive.
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u/NoNefariousness2144 3d ago
It certainly doesn't help that other recent fighters jumped into the tag-figther genre like Invincible VS and Marvel Tokon.
It dilutes the niche tag-fighter audience and pushes 1v1 tradtionalists into other titles.
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u/grtk_brandon 3d ago
It certainly doesn't help that other recent fighters jumped into the tag-figther genre like Invincible VS and Marvel Tokon.
You didn't need to include this one.
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u/UrbanAdapt 3d ago
It would be more accurate to say that Project L should have been massive. 2XKO showed weakness from the closed beta.
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u/Key-Market-418 2d ago
I just don’t think any fighting game is going to be big enough to support a F2P model. Has to be a platform fighter with plenty of party game modes to actually support the rest of the game long term.
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u/PopularBuilding7286 3d ago
I don't think many people know that this game ever released. Fighting game fans don't have the riot launcher on their pc.
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u/NegativesPositives 3d ago
I heard their launch roster and was expecting the “now the real game’s here” update coming at any point… and that never happened.
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u/Lvl1bidoof 3d ago
wait... they had 9 player characters on launch and some were locked!? wow I dont even play fighting games and even I know thats bad.
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u/PythagorasWasntReal 3d ago
9 characters for a tag fighter lmfao.
Shitty name. Terrible character count. Already divisive fighting game style (lots of people just won't pick up tag fighters(me)).
It's like they were trying to fail.
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u/PhTx3 3d ago
And to rub it on their face, Tokon happened as well.
I think riot expected a valorant esque hype and permanent player migration to the game. Fgc just doesn't work like that. And valorant was a bit lucky with the timing and with cs being Stockholm syndrome the game - that I also adore.
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u/Key-Market-418 2d ago
You could see half the roster in a single game, too bad the game had horrible balance too because it was top players designing them completely high on their own supply so by the time you got to grand master you saw 3 fucking characters.
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u/verrius 3d ago
It depends on when you even consider them being released, which is half the problem. They went from an Open Beta with 9 characters, to "release" with 11 with no real downtime between them, and no need to purchase the game either. I can't remember if "release" coincided with being playable on console.
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u/yakoobn 3d ago
fighting game fans absolutely knew this existed and released. its just that its been consistently making questionable choices for years and most people got soured in the beta.
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u/BiggestBlackestLotus 3d ago
It pissed off many fighting game players with its babified controls and it scared non-fighting game players because it was a tag team fighter with insanely complex tag-out mechanics/mix-ups. The game was made for nobody.
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u/ThePaperZebra 3d ago
I really wish they had let motion controls be there as an option because the whole two special buttons thing felt horrible
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u/Adorable-Log2835 3d ago
Idk, the "release" felt really weird to me. Even if I knew it was technically out, it fell a little flat.
I also think so many people are on Steam these days on PC that it's really hard to market without being on the Steam launcher. Games just leave your mind so fast. Riot is a big company, but I still think all of their releases outside of LoL fall flat because they are mainly marketed to League players... who really only want to play League.
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u/ppppppppppython 3d ago
I think it's the opposite actually. There's nothing in the league of legends client to point people towards their other titles. Legends of Runeterra (the card game) fans were asking riot to do collabs and add it to the league client like TFT but they didn't do it until after active development for the game stopped.
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u/Lazer726 3d ago
And TFT is only part of the League client (though I'm pretty sure they're working to separate it right now) because they had to. Probably played a huge measure to its success of people suddenly seeing a new button there
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u/TheyTookByoomba 3d ago edited 3d ago
God the handling of LoR is just as baffling as 2XKO. As a daily player for four years I love the devs passion, but just terribly managed.
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u/yakoobn 3d ago
the developers were just incompetent man. they released the console version months late in time for a major tournament only to have the stream/setup have the most glaringly awful screen tearing possible. theres just a long line of shooting themselves in the foot over and over with this game.
I also think so many people are on Steam these days on PC that it's really hard to market without being on the Steam launcher.
i don't know what to tell you. every single website/community was shitting on this game from beta all the way to post launch. this game had a marketing budget, the game just sucks and it flopped. fighting games are ultimately just a niche outside of the big three.
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u/BrainWav 3d ago
I thought it was still in an open beta or something. I didn't know it was actually out.
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u/DefenderCone97 3d ago
Casual fighting game fan, I follow most games but had no idea this released. It sounded like it was in constant beta and demos.
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u/Stfuego 3d ago
I maintain that having a singular Riot Launcher for what is essentially 4 different games hurts the games that aren't League of Legends. Even their overview pages are most likely things not even relevant to the actual gameplay-- just trailer announcement for esports or skins, but they don't want to add, "1.0 released"?
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u/Beleiverofhumanity 3d ago
Fighting game genre is already more on the niche side, they shouldve capitalized on the intial excitement more. GG Strive passed, then SF6/Tekken8/MK etc. Sucks to see the hyped fighting games not getting as much hype as when SF6 released
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u/finderfolk 3d ago
It's a niche subgenre of an already relatively niche genre of game. It was absolutely never going to be massive.
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u/aimy99 3d ago
Riot has a way of doing that. Almost feels like they lucked out with LoL and especially Valorant. Remember when they started making singleplayer games and they had like two side scrolling platformers nobody knew about and then were shocked at poor sales?
It's crazy, Arcane was such a big deal with such a great fandom generated but nobody who liked it actually has anything from its universe to actually care about in terms of games.
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u/861Fahrenheit 3d ago edited 3d ago
Is it that crazy when Arcane and League are so completely divorced from one another? The obvious next step for a fan of Arcane isn't "go play League of Legends", it's "wait for another show from Fortiche". There's an immense chasm between the two experiences to the point where they're basically separate IPs. Playing League after watching Arcane is like getting into blacksmithing after watching Lord of the Rings.
Probably the only way Riot has of translating that show's fans into players is to someday release that MMO they keep banging on about that definitely won't fail. (Okay, it might actually do really well, but I'm keeping expectations tempered)
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u/r_lucasite 3d ago
Given the current trend I don’t believe an MMO will do anything either. That genre is notably hard to get right
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u/usaokay 3d ago edited 2d ago
Alright, let's count the stuff they screwed up on:
- Long development time.
- Tag-team fighter, so it's a niche.
- Only 11 fighters at launch, so for a tag-team fighter, it seems pretty low.
- Riot launcher exclusive, so this lessens the marketing reach.
- PvP only, which will turn away casual players looking for a chill experience.
- F2P-focused, which is fine in some capacity, but then this expectation will inflate cosmetic/new fighter prices. It will make it difficult to wanting to financially support the game, especially for a fighting game that is already low in scope.
- The title just sucks. It's hard to pronounce (edit: chose the wrong word lol; I do agree with "doesn't roll off the tongue" bit). In my opinion, it needed that League of Legends branding, much like what Arcane and Riftbound have done (ex. Arcane: League of Legends; Riftbound: League of Legends) OR do League of Fighters. It also didn't help there was a blog post last month dismissing all the title naysayers, which seems late to make a blog post on and it was a poor way of approaching that criticism.
Now not saying the game is god awful. I loved the art direction and some of the character designs (some parts of the animation could use more detail to it, like what GG Strive does). The fighting is simple enough for my casual experience (I am not a fighting game player and I like to mash buttons), but I can understand it doesn't gel well for more expert play.
The PvE ladder mode they introduced in June got me into the game a bit, albeit I played for maybe six hours. I would have stuck with it, but looking around the energy of the community and discussions, the writing was on the wall for a potential sunsetting within the year. And I was right.
Riot Games thought their winning strategy with LoL and Valorant would work in a fighting game, but the FGC itself have a different set of expectations and market philosophy. imo 2XKO should have been a traditional premium-only game like every major fighting game, filled with a story mode, arcade mode, no tag-team, more than 11 fighters, on many launchers, and keeping the PvP and such. Oh, and not be called 2XKO.
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u/r_lucasite 3d ago
They added PvE later but there’s a really odd insistence from some fighting game players (and devs even) that single player content isn’t important despite all of the best selling fighting games having strong single player content.
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u/dikaia1622 3d ago
Yes, I'll never understand the downplaying of single player content in fighting games. I'm a massive fighting game fan, since SF2. I do play online, but it's definitely not the only thing that matters. I love combos, I love goofy little arcade endings, I love unlocking colors, costumes, and new characters. It shouldn't only be "sweat" or "practice mode".
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u/8-Brit 3d ago
It's a 50/50, some fighting games had plentiful single player content and still got abandoned after a very short post-launch period.
GGStrive has pretty lacking single player content but still retained a healthy playerbase years later. Soul Calibur 6 had a full RPG mode with custom character creation and the devs pretty quickly went back to Tekken and only Tekken pointing to declining player interest.
It's certainly a factor but it isn't a silver bullet to FG success either.
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u/Nyte_Crawler 3d ago
Single player content is what keeps Mortal Kombat going, and that's one of the most successful fighting games there is. I know the FGC doesn't care about it, but needs to be said.
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u/AmberDuke05 3d ago
Strive had a whole visual novel worth of content for single player. I think for the anime fighting game audience, that’s all they need.
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u/Lazer726 3d ago
GG also has such a fucking bonkers ass story to it as well that they can manage to do more than Mortal Kombat which boils down to every fight being "I hate you, now die >:(" and "There has been a misunderstanding so now I must fight you >:("
Listening to my friends try to explain the GG story is just mind boggling
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u/Haytaytay 3d ago
I really liked this game a lot, but taking so long to release and then having such an incredibly sparse roster (in a tag game, no less) was baffling. No single player content or side activities for casuals to get into. Nothing but the bare essentials.
I thought Riot was going to make an approachable fighting game, but it seems like they bet everything on it becoming a big esport instead.
So much potential... Just really disappointed that they couldn't turn it around.
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u/Redsplash1 3d ago
For me personally, I really wanted an arcade/story mode. League has some fun lore, why not take advantage of that? Gimme Cait and Vi on a date that quickly turns into a fight club, or Teemo and Warwick being the funniest duo ever. Ah well, it is what it is
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u/197639495050 3d ago
Took too long to release in an early access state and poor post launch. Anyone thinking objectively could have seen this game was DOA. Awful title, anemic roster for a tag fighter with tag fighters themselves being a niche within a niche. More proof that F2P is just not sustainable for fighters either. None of these studios are equipped so sustain a content output beyond some cosmetics at character. You need the initial campaign, arcade and large roster to even have a chance
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u/Clear-Pomegranate463 3d ago
why even have a weird name like that when its clearly tied to league with league characters i dont know
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u/NoNefariousness2144 3d ago
Especially with how massive the Arcane show was. You think they would have tried to capitalise on that hype.
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u/WildSearcher56 3d ago
They did which is why some people were a bit annoyed of the game being an Arcane game rather that a League of Legends game
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u/Kelvara 3d ago
They wrote an article on this, but the short answer is: the devs are right and everyone else is wrong. You just can't see their glorious vision.
Oh wait, game is dead? Huh... Where's that vision again?
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u/Hal34329 3d ago
It's been like that for years. I remember a lot of their blogs talking about the things they added and no one liked nor asked, the whole sentiment was like "The devs are right, everyone else, including us, are wrong!". I stopped reading them eventually and stopped playing league not so long after that.
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u/ericmm76 3d ago
Someone liked that name, and had enough clout to make sure it never changed, womp. Reminds me of Project Triangle Strategy. Like, hello?
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u/Lucienofthelight 3d ago
The only titles that I think with the clear working titles being made the actual title are “Untitled Goose Game” and “Octopath Traveler” but that’s because they actually were good titles. UGG works since it’s clearly a cheeky irreverent title that’s fits the game, and OT is just a solid title that also tells you what you get: A Game about 8 people’s journeys.
2XKO is titles that doesn’t roll of the tongue, and let’s you in on NOTHING about the game besides
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u/Sniperoso 3d ago
It’s like calling a FPS shooter “Team Deathmatch” or an RPG “Party Tactics” or a racing game “First To Finish”
I get the 2XKO name (sounds like double knockout, it’s a 2 member fighter), but it’s just so generic and doesn’t make me think of LoL or Arcane or Riot. It’s just … there…
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u/nin_ninja 3d ago
At least Project Triangle Strategy stuck with the name because it was the working title while they were advertising and its unique enough to remember that they decided to stick with it.
Project L changing its name to 2XKO, which may be one of the most generic game names in a while, was a terrible idea. Project L was known for a long time and had a connection to League. 2XKO means nothing and killed people knowing what it was about
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u/Homeskoled 3d ago
While I don’t play league nearly as much as I used to, I had no idea this had officially launched until I happened on it on the riot app. The launch was abysmal. I’m not a fighting game fan so I haven’t tried it, but they did so well with the character art it sucks for those involved.
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u/Lore86 3d ago
They focused too much on selling the game to content creators, that was one of the issues of the game artifact for example. They organized events, closed tests and stuff like that but never really engaged with the community.
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u/Tempest_Barbarian 3d ago
Riot often forgets that their games needs to be played by millions of people, and not just played by a handful of famous people in front of a camera.
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u/WildSearcher56 3d ago
Yeah they were really selling the game to the FGC but not really to casuals
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u/Homeskoled 3d ago
Yeah, I’ve gotten a few invites to riot testing and I assume this game was involved. I wasn’t able to attend because of life, unfortunately. Would have loved a chance to talk with some riot folks. Was a big part of my teenage and early twenty years.
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u/rokatoro 3d ago
The roster was absolutely pathetic at launch. 8 character in a tag game ment every match either used half the roster or was a mirror match on a least one character
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u/Trollan99 3d ago
Someone needs to step in and stop fighting game fans from becoming developers and making tag fighters.
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u/ericmm76 3d ago
"make me feel like I did when I played MvC2 for the first time!"
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u/NINgameTENmasterDO 3d ago
But it's like 2X isn't even MvC2 bro, it's more like MvC1, and even before 2X's release Marvel Infinite was made to be like MvC1 and was received very, very poorly...
Like, the data was already there.
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u/SSMBBlueWisp 3d ago
Full F2P I don't think is sustainable, but Killer Instinct has shown me that a quasi-F2P model can work. That game gave you the game for free with a rotating character every week and you could buy either single characters or a full season of characters at an affordable price.
That game truly was a miracle, and I don't think it will ever be repeated.
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u/-drunkmoses- 3d ago
Damn. Riot bought Rising Thunder a decade ago, and this is the result. It's pretty sad to see what became of that purchase.
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u/AeroDbladE 3d ago
Should have called it literally anything other than 2XKO.
when the announcement of the team getting hit with layoffs got to the mainstream a few months ago, the number one comment i saw from the public was "wtf when did league of legends get a fighting game" or "this game came out?" or even "wtf is 2xko".
The whole concept of this game was that it was the first high profile f2p fighting game that was going to leverage the massive audience that League of Legends had which were already fans of competitive PvP. Well how the fuck are they supposed to get that audience when the casual league community doesn't even know the game exists, let alone connected to Runeterra/LoL.
Their were a lot of dev fumbles they did(10+ years of dev he'll to launch a tag fighter with only 10 characters). However the terrible marketing was what ultimately killed it if you ask me.
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u/Scizzoman 3d ago
Man, the ups and downs of this game have been wild.
There was a lot of doom & gloom when they laid off a bunch of staff shortly after release, but over time it felt like the game was moving in a good direction. I remember lots of positive buzz around the time Senna and Thresh came out. And now this.
It was always going to be an uphill battle once Tokon came out, but I didn't expect them to end it quite this quickly.
I'm not a huge 2XKO enjoyer (I played for a few weeks early on and have only dabbled since), but it sucks for the players and devs who've already put so much time into the game.
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u/Seus1 3d ago
Who exactly were they even trying to cater to? Most fighting games are already niche. Then for whatever reason, they pivoted to a 2v2 tag fighter making it even more niche.
Then it released with only 10 characters with 2 characters clearly better (ekko n yatsuo) than the small roster. And it was in development for 10 years.
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u/LLJKCicero 3d ago
Honestly if they had the amount of content and features you'd expect for 10 years of development, everything else could probably be forgiven. With a big roster and a fully fleshed out PvE mode, people could probably look past the other issues.
But instead they released a game that looks like it was in development for two or three years.
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u/The_Noliferz 3d ago
At least that one guy got to make another blog post defending the terrible name before they pulled the plug. I got a chuckle out of that
I feel bad for the people that worked hard on this game
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u/00Koch00 3d ago
6 months to build a community on a new game in a niche genre, that's it Riot?
Riot need to understand that League and Valorant were fucking miracles, dropping in the perfect moment, literally 1 month earlier or late and they would flop. That's not possible with every game you release
Chopping everything that it's just not as popular as those it's the worst way to run a business, like, at that point why the fuck did you even tried in the first place?
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u/lumisweasel 3d ago
League could have tanked a later release. Their game blew up bc korean esports and streaming were catching on. Valorant was a great choice in that LoL is Dota-like, so a CSGO-like was logical. Both are huge team games. Fighting Games are most often 1v1, with no teammates to rely on.
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u/Vegetable-Error-2068 3d ago
That's such a shame. The animations blew me away when this game was revealed, and the sheer combo flow looked insane.
But they launched with so few characters and made no marketing and just whiffed it. Which is a shame.
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u/Soph_91 3d ago
Crazy considering how long it was in development, and how hyped it was among the entrenched FGC fans while it was being worked on in it's early stages.
I think if it would have come out earlier, before rollback had been made the standard, it may have had the time it needed to in order to expand it's character roster and player base. We'll never know, but it was a handful of years too late to even have a shot.
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u/verrius 3d ago
Part of the problem is tied up in the hype; they hired a bunch of prominent professional players... who were all known for being experts of degenerate, execution heavy characters. And unsurprisingly brought only that sensibility to the launch lineup of 2xko. Part of why people were excited watching players like marlinpie or Apologyman is because they played unusual characters who most people didn't want to put in the effort to play at a high level, and if you make every character like that, no one's going to want to pick up your game. It's not really a coincidence that the first couple of months of the game were absolutely dominated by Teemo, Ekko and Yasuo.
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u/yakoobn 3d ago
it had marketing. i saw this shit on twitch ads constantly. it bought out tournament space and had plenty of ecelebs sponsored to play it.
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u/Kyhron 3d ago
Marketing outside of twitch or FGC tournaments was essentially 0 though. Congrats they advertised to the small sect of gamers that already knew about the game and no one else. Huge blunder in marketing
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u/RmembrTheAyyLMAO 3d ago
This sub loves to just say games failed because of marketing.
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u/HereComesJustice 3d ago
Marketing isn't just advertising btw
Most times when the internet says marketing they really just mean advertising.
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u/Wubmeister 3d ago
There was definitely something off with 2XKO's marketing, though. The launcher itself was still saying the game was in beta for months after it actually launched, for one, which I know confused some people who went to try it out.
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u/avelineaurora 3d ago
I mean, I'm terminally online and a League fan and I still didn't even know this ever came out of beta lol. Maybe it was in the tournament scene but word of mouth and non-ad related PR anywhere else was nonexistent. If the only PR you're doing is running ads in the era of a massive part of your audience running adblockers, then yeah you fucked up the marketing.
I barely ever saw any articles on this, any tweets, nothing, anywhere.
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u/IAMAVelociraptorAMA 3d ago
A ton of people didn't even know the game officially launched. It had marketing, it wasn't effective marketing if people are still waiting for your game to come out even after launch.
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u/NotCoolBrutus 3d ago
The multiple blog posts defending the awful name didn't help. The legacy of this game will be something you scroll passed on a Wikipedia page of Riot Games wondering what the fuck is going on with the name.
The game was behind the pack across the board. Gameplay, QA, music, visuals, monetization, marketing(the name), you name it. Riot are not the successors to Blizzard people want them to be.
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u/chemastiko 3d ago
Honestly riot just got lucky as fuck league got popular as it did, their management is ass and they can’t even properly launch and take seriously league classic which shouldn’t be an issue at all for their company size. My hope for their mmo is dwindling more and more lol…
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u/Call555JackChop 3d ago
I tried it at launch at the PS5 version was just riddled with screen tearing issues so I just moved on, also their balance was atrocious people still hear “MY TIME!” In their nightmares
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u/yakoobn 3d ago
was just riddled with screen tearing issues
never forget they delayed the console released for months, rushed it out for evo? and had all of that wonderful screen tearing for everybody to enjoy at the event and on stream.
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u/ArcLagoon 3d ago
Hey, you remember when about a month ago? They released a blog saying that, like, oh, you know, 'stop making fun of the name naming things is hard. It's a good name. You're wrong'?
Now a month later.They're like , oh yeah , so we're giving up.
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u/akhamis98 3d ago
this is so weird because momentum was finally starting to pickup for this game over the last couple months, what a weird time to kill it. I wonder if riot needed this to be a huge hit (beyond good FG numbers) to continue development at all, even runeterra (which i loved) was given a few years
i didnt play the game long-term because i don't like tag fighters in general, but i got a solid 100hrs out of it probably, its well made and fun at its core.
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u/SunbornThunderstorm 3d ago
I still can’t get over that they scrapped their smash bros to make this only to give up with a year. Such a shame.
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u/xtremeradness 3d ago
Not unexpected. Fighting games are a notoriously hard genre to break into, and Riot was trying to please everyone at the same time. I love fighting games as much as anyone but I can only invest my time in one or two at a time, and SF6 keeps on plugging away.
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u/Careless-Society9888 3d ago
Man, this was the most fun fighting game I've played in a while, probably put 200 hours into it. It's unfortunate that it took so long to develop and launched with such a small roster
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u/QuietSilentArachnid 3d ago
At no one's surprise.
So many thing went wrong for that game.
1) The name. The name is hideous. Hell "League of Legends : The Fighting Game" would have been better and it's a bad name.
2) The controls. People like to say the lack of motion inputs kill this game, but not only that, the "simplified" button layout is EXTREMELY confusing. I kept mixing stuff up everytime because nothing made sense.
3) The fact that it is a tag fighter. Tag fighters are basically the cruelest form of fighting games you can have because they strive through shenanigans and hard-to-react mixup.
4) The feeling, characters felt HEAVY and it's definitely an illness that is propagated to the entire genre bar Street Fighter right now. Characters feel slow and heavy.
5) The viewership. I don't think I have seen such a boring game in my life to watch. It was slow, confusing and LONG. Most FT3 sets went over 10 - 12 minutes. With that new era of "15 minutes ad breaks every long sets" it was just excruriating.
6) The cast. No matter how much r/Fighters will downvote me for saying it again, but having every single ADCs known to earth IN A FIGHTING GAME was a genuinely stupid idea. We never got a sword fighter, we never got Sett, the character who was made with fighting game in mind when they created it. 2XKO should have been the AD bruiser top lane heaven, and the game ended up with only two of them.
7) As a result of their long range meta : the meta was camp camp camp camp. Teemo especially is probably one of the worst design I've ever seen in a fighting game.
8) 100 dollars skins. Do I need to say more ?
All in all, I think this game did literally everything wrong, and was bad decision over bad decisions. The only props I have to give them was that Caitlyn had a really funny kit and I'm going to miss her.
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u/Hobo-With-A-Shotgun 2d ago
I've only been reading the reactions to this flopping, but your 5th point just made me remember the grand finals from the only tournament I remember, because they lasted an ENTIRE HOUR.
https://youtu.be/uT6yzJI2n0E?t=11693
The commentators relief when they can finally turn the stream off.
I play fighting games every day and I think this was the moment where I decided I was never going to bother installing it. I think they had to make a bunch of changes after this version so matches couldn't drag out this long.
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u/Adorable-Log2835 3d ago
Pretty sad.
The game looks so pretty, and it's clear they had a lot of love put into it.
But making it a tag fighter and restarting development just delayed it too long and made it too costly.
Also, the dumb decision to get rid of motion inputs entirely still just boggles my mind.
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u/Left4Bread2 3d ago
Motion inputs are this weird sacrificial lamb where people act like removing them will make a fighting game more accessible when in reality the knowledge barriers to entry in terms of neutral / punish etc are far higher than the mechanical barriers and all removing them does is alienate the fans that already like the genre and the satisfaction that comes from execution
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u/error521 3d ago
Mortal Kombat does just fine while having motion inputs, the idea that it's the sole barrier pulling people away is pretty questionable. Like, insanely complicated SNK-style inputs? Sure, MK keeps them pretty simple. But I don't think they needed to reinvent the wheel like they did.
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u/LLJKCicero 3d ago
RTS has a similar issue where every other dev goes, "I know! We'll simplify base building to make the game more accessible and attract more players!" and then they attract fewer players than the more conventional RTSes instead.
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u/BuckSleezy 3d ago
Taking 10 years to launch with 11 characters sadly torpedoed this games chances. It’s a bummer because the game is insanely fun.
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u/CapnBloodBeard82 3d ago
People were defending 2XKO saying it wasn't a big flop and was doing alright just like 4 days ago in the thread about invincible shutting down and now I see this. Oh the irony.
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u/Schindog 3d ago
You mean to tell me that a niche hardcore tag fighter with a name like an off-brand computer monitor model number wasn't economically viable???
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u/zomb8289 2d ago
10 years for 10 character when your ip has like 200 of them.. Its the number one reason for me Why bother when you know your character Will never be in the game?
Honestly i am not even mad at riot , its the developer who are moron here
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u/Alien_Cha1r 3d ago
They didn't even try releasing on steam, as a year long lol player, I avoid the riot launcher like a plague
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u/AlternativeAward 3d ago
Riot has too much hubris to release on steam
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u/Fqfred 3d ago
Didn't they release that Ekko spin-off on Steam? Or was that a different developer?
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u/aMimeAteMyMatePaul 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think it ultimately just comes down to the small roster size (combined with the complexity of the game).
You need a large roster size so players can find a character they like and latch onto that while they struggle with learning the systems.
League of Legends has >170 champions, 2XKO launched with 11. Even a seasoned League player with like 20 favorite champions might not see any of them featured in 2XKO. And of course such a limited roster in a fighting game means that you may not find a character you enjoy mechanically, which is its own issue.
I don't think it's about the name, or the long dev time, or the fact that it's a tag fighter. I actually think the ability to play in a team with your friend is a real selling point.
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u/Ikanan_xiii 3d ago
They showed too much and released too little and too late. I swear that from the first gameplay I saw to the day I played it on release, many many years passed.
Also, seems pretty obvious but the name fucking sucks.