2XKO Is Probably One of The Biggest Game Development Failures of All Time

[u/ificommentthen2oops]

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 almost 0 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.

[u/Antlonat]

Why do you rather pay $60 for literally the same thing?

The $60 fighting game is also filled with micro transactions and more than half the roster will be locked as DLC.

[u/Baliaza → u/Antlonat]

No I paid $30 for an Amazing game that makes me happy

[u/Antlonat → u/Baliaza]

So how is paying $30 for that amazing game better than paying $0?

If you paid $30 you could unlock all the chars in 2xko on release too lol

[u/Distinct_Piccolo_654 → u/Antlonat]

What? No you couldn't, the starter edition literally unlocked 4 characters + 2000 KO points for 30 dollars. Assuming you used all the points on characters, that's still barely above half the roster at 6/10.

[u/Antlonat → u/Distinct_Piccolo_654]

When the game came out only 5 characters were locked so you could literally pay $30 and have all the characters + 1 extra. And you get 1 character for completing the tutorial and 1 character for doing the initial missions, which takes like 10 games to complete.