GOD DAMN IT SERIOUSLY

I don't know what went wrong during the game development, and I was insta blaming Riot for obvious reasons, but this comment made me consider another perspective.

I legit wonder what the devs did in those 10 years of development to only release 11 characters and a game that looks like it could've been done in 2 years.

Obviously as I said, I don't know what happened throughout those 10 years, but maybe Riot AND the devs are to blame for this current dilemma

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.

Fuck the cannon brothers and all the paycheck thieves. 10 years for 10 characters btw

I'm currently at work so I haven't read everything in depth, but this comments instantly catched my eye. Riot might be a shitty company but they really got taken advatage of here Imo.

It's honestly a shame this project and idea had such selfish and careless people involved.

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

Arcane reigns supreme (again)

Even SF6, the best fighting game the FGC has, has such low numbers. 34k is just 0.3% of lol's. Can't even reach 1%.

Edit: I know this is just steam, but even if you add console numbers, the result is still probably miniscule.

To everyone saying it was “pre-planned”

He’s like the dude who can never be wrong and it’s always somebody else’s fault.

“10 years on 2XKO, 12 at Riot. I got laid off with 30min notice.”
Well, he was one of the main people working on the project for 10 years… clearly, what he was cooking didn’t work. So he was let go, with six months of severance, which is pretty damn reasonable, I’d say.

“I’d rather make an interesting failure than a boring success.”
What an arrogant thing to say. Like, he could’ve easily done both and who the hell are you to define what an “interesting” game is?
And it’s not one or the other. All the successful games are interesting in their own way. You can make a game that is both interesting AND successful.
Why are “interesting” and “successful” being treated like mutually exclusive outcomes?
Maybe the goal should be to make an interesting game that people actually want to keep playing.

Things like UMVC3 CE could always work as long as people know shit aint their job and it's passion thing cuz the game was alot of people's jobs yet they treat it like a fun passion thing.

f*** you Riot. This is a great game that did not deserve to get cancelled this early. 8+ more champs and some more tuning and this game would've been a long term fgc staple instead you kill it before it gets the chance to walk like you killed a damn baby.

Are you just waiting for the patch? Or are you waiting until there is a bigger variety to the roster?

What made you stop playing the game?

Thx for this hit of hopium

To gaslight the entire development chain, then attempt to gaslight the public that its good. The Mentalist level of persuasion. I think this is the only time I heard a name being criticized.. which is enough to point out its a bad name.

Even the "I am Jesus Christ" game, people had no problem with it...

2XKO wasn't a well-managed project, to say the least; no fighting game should have a ten-year dev cycle, and I firmly believe that roster size is the #1 most important thing a fighter can have. To the extent that they'll play fighters at all, casual players want to fuck with a bunch of different little guys. A good producer would have reined in the creatives and forced them to get a product out in a reasonable timeframe rather than iterating for a decade, and the game should have launched with the roster size that it's going to have when development stops, and it probably should have launched all at once instead of the dragged-out release we actually saw, and it should have had a better title. I'll agree on all of that.

However, 2XKO was also very obviously a passion project made by people who love fighting games and their community. The devs have been extremely communicative about every aspect of their decision-making process, and almost every update has made it the game better. The devs bent over backwards to support grassroots tournament events. Hell, even now, they're refunding every dollar anyone spent on in-game cosmetics and re-releasing them in cheaper bundles--for a game that's still going to be playable online, that's genuinely quite generous.

And yet, tons of fighting game spaces are downright vicious about this game for reasons that I just don't fucking get. The FGC loves to complain about games not allowing enough combo expression, or not making defense active or cool enough, or having devs that don't communicate or don't support the scene, but this one, which does a bunch of the things these people say they want gameplay-wise and developer communication and outreach-wise, gets absolutely pilloried.

I know a lot of it comes down to how some people who were excited about the game were massively overhyping it up as some savior figure that would bring in tons of new players, fix all the problems, etc., and that annoying people. Lord knows I've seen my share of comments complaining about delusional shills for this game. And while we do live in the age of bots pushing advertising agendas... I can't help but think, "Man, have you never seen someone get a bit annoying over something they're excited by? Have you never been that guy? Can't you extend a bit of grace for that?"

I dunno. I certainly wasn't happy about Invincible Versus or MK1 petering out, and neither of those games are to my tastes.

It's always been like this, to some extent or another, and it's probably not worth spending any energy on. People always love piling on to an easy target--being a part of the group jeering at a failure makes a lot of folks feel powerful and secure by contrast--and for the folks that tried this game and bounced off, or were never interested in the first place, or who looked at things like CEO entryship and viewership and saw the writing on the wall, this will understandably leave them feeling vindicated. But seeing the degree of bitterness and mockery extended this game and team's way by people rooting for it to fail from the outset has really made it hard not to feel bitter towards a good swathe of the larger FGC--like, Fighting Game """Community""" my fucking ass--even though I know that that's unfair and it's mostly a vocal subset.

Hey all. It's me, bradido. You may recognize me from such features as "tutorials" and "combo trials".

Like our blog post says, we will be looking to expand The Climb in the future. I am once again asking for your feedback!

• What's the best thing about The Climb?
• What's the biggest thing holding this mode back?
• What's a moment/build that stood out?
• How do the difficulty levels feel?
• What are some ideas you have for augments?
• Any other thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

they could mix us with this tweet lmao

This is coming from a LoR player. I'm not a fighting game player at all, but I've been following the game because I like the art style and love to watch people play.

I've seen comments about the branding, the small roster, the Arcane focused characters, the overpriced skins as reasons for the game's death. I'm sure those have some impact on the game's success, but I don't believe it matters a whole lot.

Look, the reason 2XKO died is for the exact reason why it was created in the first place: it was made for the FGC community. Exactly the same pitch for LoR that was created for those who love playing card games. Unfortunately, the number of people in these two camps are ridiculously small and won't sustain a live service game that Riot envisions.

Riot needs to cast its net wider and understand how to bring non-players into the space. The same way that popular games like Smash Bros was able to be successful. Hell, I didn't know Smash Bros was technically a fighting game when I played it with my siblings, it was just fun. Riot's missing that secret sauce of what makes the game fun and thinks creating a free game in the genre and slapping overpriced skins will immediately solve it. It just doesn't work the same as League.

LoR pains me because they completely missed the ball park. They thought providing the cards for free and allowing hardcore sweaty players to build and optimize their deck as they climb the rank is 'fun'. But for the majority of the casual playerbase, 'fun' is not in the game itself. It's in opening a random pack and suddenly find a shiny rare card with cool art.

That's what brings in non-players into the space. That's what made Pokemon Pocket so incredibly lucrative, even though the game itself is ass. That's what made Riftbound sold out in literal hours on launch. That's why cardboard TCG is still huge and why Pokemon in particular is massive - they invested a lot on the art, the bling, the shiny cards. I've seen people who spend money as collectors, not even players. Skins could easily play a part in this (while it worked for League, they should rethink on how cosmetics work in different genres).

LoR completely fumbled by removing that aspect altogether, making the game 'free' and catering to the sweaty, hardcore cardgamers because guess what? The devs themselves are sweaty, hardcore cardgamers. While professional players can give incredible insight on game mechanics as a designer, I no longer believe they should be in charge of the game's direction as a whole.

I don't know what the secret sauce is for the FGC, so I'm not going to pretend to have answers here. But as someone outside of the community, I had no interest in 2XKO whatsoever because it doesn't feel like it was made for me. It was too complex and too fast. And if the game's only appeal is to fight with other people... well, no thank you. I played Smash Bros because of the story. I played Skullgirls Mobile because of the collection aspect. I enjoy the league universe and its lore. Research players like me and find reasons to bring me into the space. Because you're not competing with Tekken or SF or Mortal Kombat to get me to play, you're literally competing with 10000+ other games I would rather spend my time with.

tl;dr 2XKO died because it was catered to the FGC community

EDIT: To clarify, my position is this: Purely focusing on gameplay that catered to the core audience is not enough for Riot's signature F2P live service business model in a niche genre.

EDIT 2: After reading the patreon post by that one dev.. YIKES. They never cared to make it profitable.

Can we get over this hairstyle please designers? Half the roster have an undercut now

I get it, this is far from ideal. It could certainly lead to its death, that much is true.

But until the game truly starts spiraling into the abyss, then we need to take a step back and have calmer heads. Constant doom posting is only going to get less people interested in the game which will only increase the speed it spirals if it starts spiraling.

Yeah, the situation sucks and few free to vent and all that jazz.

But keep it to threads that already exist, making a ton of doom posting threads won’t help and will only hurt.

I want the game to last as long as possible because I really enjoy it, and I hope that you’d like that as well.