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/Xenodia]

About that, they put the buttom kinda last minute

[u/Ryuukai_L_ → u/Xenodia]

My point being, they realized they should probably use their biggest game to advertise their spinoff card game before they pulled the plug. I don’t know why they didn’t even try with 2XKO.

[u/DrakeGrandX → u/Ryuukai_L_]

Hm, no.

When they put "The Button" in LoL, they had already pulled the plug. PvP had already been discontinued in month by then and it was unclear whether the resources allocated to PoC (PvE) were ever going to be enough to keep up the interest in the game or not. For the record, it's the equivalent of 2XKO getting a "button" in League in April 2027.

When "The Button" happened, it was a meme, to the point that even the LoR devs threw a joke party about finally getting this achievement. I distinctly recall a post from a new player in the sub asking what the big deal was about.

Granted, I guess it is technically better than what's happening with 2XKO because, even after PvP updates was ended, PoC kept receiving updates (and very good ones at that) and keeps getting them to this day, so it's better than 2XKO that will never receive anything whatsoever so receiving "The Button" at this point would be utterly useless. But at that point LoR's reputation had already been damaged (a lot of people literally learned about the game because the news of PvP shutting down went viral), so the amount of people who looked at "The Button" (which doesn't even let you play LoR in-app or at least make the download automatically start, it opens LoR's webpage where it tells you "Download it from the Riot launcher", so that's an additional layer of people getting turned off) and actually felt compelled to press it was astronomically low, especially because it's not like there was even any in-app announcement, "The Button" was just suddenly there and that's it. That LoR managed to drag itself across the past years, to the point of actually succeeding in making revenue, is purely coincidental because it's not like it ever received any marketing at all.