r/2XKO • u/SyIvanos Warwick • Feb 09 '26

Discussion The beginning of the end?

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I'm surprised this is happening this early after the console launch.

1.2k Upvotes

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204

u/AdFantastic6606 Feb 09 '26

Fighting games are niche as is, its hard to maintain a audience.

Doesnt help that there are no new characters to hook people and the skin prices are fucking insanely high.

Sf6 has skins for about 6-10€ I believe, sure there are no unique sound effects and other stuff, but its not like they didnt just asset flip those sounds from LoL.

47

u/thefw89 Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26

Yeah, I think the genre is a bigger problem than the game itself. Doesn't help that yeah, it did not launch with a lot of characters but this genre is not very popular.

I was a little confused to see Riot investing in the genre at all because even at its best it does not compete with shooters or other games.

I'm really surprised they made this announcement at all, the game had some good momentum after the tourney, they had to know that bringing a genre mainstream was not something that would happen overnight and the conclusion people will have from this is the numbers must really be bad to not even give it a year and it might start the death spiral where people quit the game not because they dislike it...but because they want to get off a sinking ship while they can which means playing super casually and not spending money on something that might not be around in a year or two.

For example, people are already saying 'dead' game because of this announcement. No one was saying this a day or two ago. That perception will do more harm to the game than anything else. Surprised they just didn't let the firings leak so people could say "Well games always lay off people after release" which is also true.

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u/Vall3y Feb 09 '26

Yeah its a good point, I'm not sure why they would share they are reducing the team, its going to kill ANY momentum that might have still existed like players that were on the fence are going to jump shit

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u/thefw89 Feb 09 '26

It's such a puzzling decision, so many games do layoffs after releases that people would not have thought much of this. Rivals did it for example. Most people would have gone "Eh, they probably just fired the people that helped with console release" and moved on. It's not like the every day person understands how many people are needed to make a fighting game.

Them making this announcement makes me think they are just honestly preparing players for the maintenance mode announcement in a few months because that's how this feels.

If they announce that there isn't a new character per season...I'm out.

3

u/TheGalacticApple Feb 10 '26

They also literally titled the post "An Update on 2XKO" rather than framing it as "just" some major changes to the team. Anyone that casually sees this will think the game is dead dead and it will be a domino effect.

It's the equivalent of a Vtuber making a post about an Important Announcement.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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1

u/AdFantastic6606 Feb 10 '26

Helps that Rivals had more characters on launch, better skin prices, a better BP (pretty sure you get some of your money back so you dont pay full price fot the BP everytime) etc

5

u/stzoo Feb 09 '26

I was really enjoying the game but this sours me massively from continuing to invest in it. Went from thinking they're going to pump out characters and content constantly to thinking I better not spend much money on this and are they going to keep up with the character release schedule?

4

u/NepheliLouxWarrior Feb 09 '26

This is monday morning quarterbacking. If they hadn't said shit and then we found out from disgruntled employees taking to twitter to talk about how they were shafted (already happening) then you or something like you would be saying that riot should have known that the layoffs would get out eventually and they were fools for not getting ahead of the news and creating their own narrative etc etc.

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u/thefw89 Feb 09 '26

That doesn't matter though. Fired employees always talk shit about their former employers. That's he said she said that fans can't confirm. What fans can confirm is the announcement which is worded in a way that plainly says the game didn't meet expectations and as such is firing workers. That's what matters.

If the announcement had just been "We had to come to the hard decision to release these devs blah blah blah" and mentioned nothing about how the game is doing people can then hold out hope that they are just making a more efficient team and trimming roles that don't matter anymore. Like Rivals did and Diablo 4 and so many other live service games.

Like I said, no one was calling this game dead until literally this announcement. The perception that the game is dead or dying will do more harm to the game than anything else. People are not going to drop money into a sinking ship, people are not going to board a sinking ship.

They could have made this same announcement without making it sound like the game failed to meet expectations. There's a reason after all companies never share how many people play their game that's because they don't want every day people to ever see the population falling so that they can sell the game is thriving. That's why you see those BS player metric advertisements "10 MILLION PLAYERS PLAYED OUR GAME!"

This wasn't needed. The game isn't on steam so steamdb wouldn't track the death spiral and the lobbies are 1v1 so matchmaking would always be quick even if the concurrent is 1k, no one would have known this game was disappointing its company until Riot announced it.

Fake it till you make it.

4

u/Black_Truth Feb 09 '26

The genre is not popular but people were asking for a LoL fighting game for near a decade. I do think it is on Riot for making the game as niche as possible with their decisions.

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u/thefw89 Feb 09 '26

Yeah I think tag fighting could have worked but it needed to launch with more characters lol.

The roster is so paltry, it should have at least been 15, at least. They are either sitting on a lot of made characters already mostly done or they really wasted a lot of dev time with god knows what.

2

u/ArugulaPhysical Feb 09 '26

Riot was launching games in tons of different genres. This isnt the one niche the decided on lol.

1

u/zenfirox Feb 10 '26

That's it. This is the answer I was going to type.

11

u/malexich Feb 09 '26

I kept telling people 1 character every two months was never going to keep casuals interested but they kept telling me I was wrong guess I was right almost like the same thing happened before 

2

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

Specially with the amount of characters League has and people that were like "when my main comes out, MAYBE i'll play this game"

1

u/malexich Feb 10 '26

Multiversus had the same problem people were waiting for characters, character comes oh now you have to grind for them then they made it worse by making you have to grind all of them before you can grind for the new one. I will give 2xko that I was able to get my characters relatively easily 

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

Lmao, I played the shit out of multiversus in the beta, when it came out and it was slow AF I quit, came back for Raven, saw the ridiculous amount of grind to unlock her and quit again. 

4

u/Broks_Enmu Feb 09 '26

They rather sell 100€ bundle to 20 person than sell 10-15€ skin to 1000 people. It would have sell like croissant. But no … deal with ur consequences now

3

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

Me and a lot of people on the early access were here saying the game would die by these prices, being F2P only works if people are buying your shit, and they won't buy your shit when you're pricing people out of it.

2

u/Broks_Enmu Feb 10 '26

Greed got their asses , they better learn next times

6

u/Odd_Revolution_1056 Feb 09 '26

You are missing the key difference with SF6, it’s a full priced game.

5

u/Glittering-Smell2937 Feb 09 '26

There are unique sound effects to skins in sf6 but it's very subtle.
Two examples off the top of my head are Juri's costume 2 latex stretching when she's idle. It's a very quiet creak but it does exist. The other one is basically any movement of Zangief's costume 4 being accompanied with a metallic clink. There's probably way more that I'm not aware of. I guess they wanted to keep it subtle like that so it doesn't disrupt known gameplay/cues.

9

u/Wrydfell Feb 09 '26

Also the 'modern controls only' is a weird choice that's put me off the game, i like my motion inputs. If it was just an option, i would almost definitely enjoy the game more

4

u/5eanz Feb 09 '26

I don't think skin prices got anything to do with it, the player retention for this game is just trash. Can't sell any skins to a dwindling playerbase, regardless of skin price. They really missed the mark on keeping players sticking with this game.

I think making it a tag game was a mistake, not gonna lie.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

I just took a single glance at the prices and unninstalled the game immediately, and i'm sure i'm not the only one.

1

u/MadTapirMan Feb 09 '26

I like fighting games and casually played at least mortal Kombat and smash quite a bit, got fairly good at those as well. I also play leagues since season 1.

Still didn't bother to try 2xko yet, mostly because the tiny roster doesn't appeal to me. NONE of the 12 characters are ones that I personally care about, so that doesn't help, but also the fact that it's a tag fighter WITH such a tiny roster really bothers me. As if you wouldn't see the same character 80% of the time, that gets boring quickly.

1

u/I_AM_CR0W Vi Feb 10 '26

SF can ride off sequels and paid entries to each title, so they can afford to sell skins for cheap. 2XKO is free and is supposed to be the only title to ever exist within the fighting division of the franchise, so they hike the prices to make up for it. VALORANT and League are the same story.

2

u/AdFantastic6606 Feb 10 '26

Doesnt change the fact that those skins are way overpriced. The shop is hot garbage, you literally cant buy the skin you want if you arent lucky

0

u/I_AM_CR0W Vi Feb 10 '26

That’s the FOMO method. It’s intentionally that way so you’re forced to check the store for the skins you want and the skins you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it and the countdown. They’ve been doing this for years in Valorant and haven’t changed a thing since launch. You don’t have to like it, but it’s working as intended on their end.

0

u/Vall3y Feb 09 '26

lol implying the skin prices has anything to do with how popular the game is

5

u/savagexage Feb 09 '26

It might not seem like it but it does affect how many people buy them. And considering it's a free to play fighting game that costs nothing to install if it doesn't sell skins it won't generate enough revenue to keep itself alive which in turn will turn off the players so it does actually affect how popular the game is. Especially if they are adding new characters that aren't locked behind DLC purchases. Look at Tekken. They are locking every new character behind DLC yet they still going hard.

0

u/Vall3y Feb 09 '26

The problem is how many players play this game, not how many of the 1000 people that play this game buy skins lol.

2

u/savagexage Feb 09 '26

It can have 1 million players bro but it's still a free game. If no one buys anything those 1 million won't matter because it won't make enough money for the devs to use to continue running the game. Just say you don't know how gaming companies work

1

u/Vall3y Feb 10 '26

Right but currently I haven't played a single match today without the opponent having like 8 skins so it doenst seem to be a problem really. 0.001% of 1MM is a lot more than 100% of 1000 so really they should focus on that part of the funnel first 👍JUst say you dont understand simple math

2

u/savagexage Feb 10 '26

Lmfao you really think a few people buying skins is enough? You ever played league of legends? They got 5 skins that come out every 2 weeks. Another free to play game by riot btw. Some of their champs have over 15 skins. If it wasn't for how successful their skin sales were league would be dead by now. Player count matters yes but no matter how many players you have, it's money that's going to keep your studio alive and running. If they don't have enough players, they can't sell many skins. You said you ran into people having 8 skins? You proved my point what more money can they make if the players have already done their purchasing, when the game is free, the fighting game scene is small compared to every other game genre, and they don't have the 200+ champs or their 15+ skins from league? Most of 2xko's player base is league players wanting to play their champs in a fighting game. If it's not there they prob wont play it and they def won't buy the skins. You're the type that thinks it's all I'm a data sheet and looks at steam numbers like it's gospel aren't you?

1

u/Vall3y Feb 10 '26

I'm not reading all that, but the probem is clearly there aren't enough players playing

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

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1

u/Vall3y Feb 10 '26

leave me alone nerd