RIOT Ends Development For 2XKO (No One Is Surprised)

I had been telling my friends this was going to flop since it was announced. There is ZERO chance any company could be successful with a tag fighter unless your existing player base frequents fighting games.

Take myself as an anecdotal example - I've barely played any fighters over the course of my life besides Smash with friends at parties. I liked Killer Instinct - as short lived as my time on it was - my point being that I was never a 'fighting game player'. But I do love the League universe...

Take the average League fan like myself (who has little to no experience in this genre) and ask them to learn THE HARDEST SUB-GENRE of fighting game on the planet.

What Was Riot's Plan?

The economics of success here also make no sense to me. Riot was banking on something like this:

League IP → huge initial awareness → free-to-play removes purchase barrier → accessible tutorials → FGC adoption → tournaments/Evo create spectators and creators → some spectators become players → live-service skins monetize a much larger casual audience.

The problem is that there's a giant question mark in the middle of that:

Fighting games have always struggled to expand beyond a relatively niche core audience. There have obviously been commercially successful modern fighters. The issue isn't that nobody buys fighting games. It's that fighting games have an huge retention problem compared with the genres Riot has had success in.

In it's final moments, Riot cut the development team in February of this year, they said (echoing my earlier point) that the game had found a "passionate core audience," but overall momentum wasn't sufficient to support a team of that size.

Competitive Dreams & Inevitable Failure

Riot understood that competitive play would probably be the linchpin of 2XKO’s success. Its initial plans included supporting 20 community tournaments, including five Majors, while putting serious money behind events like Evo, where more than $135,000 in prize money was up for grabs.

And that strategy worked: 2XKO found a core audience (like most other fighters do on release). The problem is that tournament success, prize pools, pro players, and an enthusiastic FGC don’t necessarily translate into the consistently active player base required to sustain a live-service game. There was so many other things in the way too...

• 'Fans' seemingly being performative (not watching streams or actually playing)
• Riding the 'Arcane wave' and not adding ACTUAL FIGHTERS like Lee Sin, Sett, Trundle, etc.
• Horrible (or just none at all, I never saw a single one) advertising
• Riot thinking every game they release will have League-level success - and subsequently canceling everything that doesn't
• Not on Steam
• Insane microtransaction prices

They should've just made Riot Smash Bro's and I think that would have been a hit - but they chose to chase some super niche nonsense and flopped another game. Just amazing!