This game spent nearly a decade in development to end up like this.
80 employees given 6 months severance or the ability to change departments
Yeah, it’s not the worst deal in the world for them, but it does show how the game definitely didn’t take off like a free to play game needs to to survive.
I play league. Im still not sure 2XKO is released. I could check but it just seems like they didnt get word out anywhere
It released. They’ve been juicing fighting game tournaments, and somehow the game made its way to NorthernLion, so I don’t know if that was their marketing or not. I don’t know what they did differently here than marketing for something like Valorant, but I only really saw ads for Valorant around the time that it came to consoles, which 2XKO has now done.
While I do like the genre, fighting games are a niche nowadays, and you’re always going up against Street Fighter, Tekken or Smash. I don’t know what Riot expected. It has similar vibes to the Saudis investing millions into a single marketing event for CotW.
Even Mortal Kombat 1, while it was initially a commercial success, is basically no longer supported as far as I know. And that game isn’t old either.
The visible audience (Twitter) is very picky and vocal; they’ll tell you they want thing X, they get thing X, they’ll tell you it’s bad because Y. There is very little nuance it seems sometimes.
Remember when everyone complained there were no defensive options and everything was getting too easy? Them CotW came and nobody plays it because the menu sucks. Or they don’t like the character that they don’t have to pick.
I at least have a legitimate reason not to play 2XKO (kernel level anti cheat that won’t work on Linux), but you don’t see me complaining about that.
Anyhow, if you want to make a game that sells big numbers, don’t make it a fighting game, because your audience will be comparably small and hate you.
Except for Fatal Fury, which is a revival of a series that people haven’t heard of in decades, all of those games are tremendously successful and could not be counted as niche anymore. MK1 did poorly by Mortal Kombat standards, which still made it the eighth best-selling game of 2023. DBFZ sold over 10 million copies. The genre is not the problem; not even being a tag fighter is the problem. This game just didn’t take off, and free-to-play games need volume. If anything, the genre is in a gold rush, and there’s still more money to be made, but you’ll have to charge for it up front.
