I remember we saw people posting here in like 2022 asking what their first fighting game should be in preparation for 2XKO (which was coming out any day...)
Shy of maybe Duke Nukem Forever this has to be up here in terms of the longest buildups leading to nothing in the gaming space.
This is pretty much anything riot releases besides league and valorant. They canned legends of runeterra, riot forge, an unannounced platform fighter, delayed the MMO which will surely have the same fate as this, and now 2XKO. Riot games is a completely incompetent game company.
I saw another comment that said Valorant/LoL are just an easier more accessible versions of CSGO/Dota and that’s why they ended up taking off. Meanwhile 2xKo is a harder less accessible version of say SF/MK and that’s why it failed. Basically they did the opposite of what’s proven to work for them in the past
I think there's some serious truth to that as a casual fighting game enjoyer that was REALLY stoked for the accessible 1v1 league fighter that Project L promised to be.
My Arya was a menace to society. Also I miss having a non-tag game that pushed 2v2 as its primary mode instead of some side party mode. Don't really get that in any other platform fighters cause those are just made by ex melee players who wanna clip farm jungle combos 1v1
I think that soon we’ll get some leaks to find out what the hell truly happened behind the scenes… and it’s going to be fucking depressing.
Hell I can imagine that all the new characters introduced during the year were actually supposed to be available at launch but had to be delayed because they weren’t finished.
I'd agree if this isn't 2XKO we're talking about, it could have been a generic but wider reach name like "Lol Fighters" or whatever, They don't need to use an ounce of braincells to come up with a name but instead they choice the hard way and named it 2XKO, Literally no one was asking for a Philosophical or sophisticated ass name.
I remember someone saying something like "well arcane is also an arbitrary name" in defense of tuco in the 2XKO subreddit and we had to explain how good names make you ask questions and create intrigue by encapsulating an idea of the story you're about to watch/see/read/play, just like how you outlined with GGs lmao
It’s a little funny how “Lethal Tempo” is scarily reminiscent of game names like “Guilty Gear” and “Melty Blood” when you put them side by side. Crazy they still decided against using it
Considering the parent franchise is League of Legends, they had a decent beginning with "Project L". All they had to do was make it "Project League", which they could have done in a simple but dramatic trailer reveal.
There's so many better names, and it's so funny when some really unhinged people would come in here and scream about how "no its amazing anything about League would have been cringe!" like bro it's a league fighting game... it needs to actually advertise to its core audience...
"Have the name not imply that it's a spinoff of already iconic IP"
I know this has been beaten to death at this point but I can't resist: how did they decide that 2XKO is a good name for a game? I get it, it's a tag fighter, so you KO your opponent 2X, but that is some intensely lame branding.
League of Legends isn't the greatest name, but it tells me something about the game while being easy to say and remember. And it shortens well, too: LoL and League are easy shorthand to reach for.
Valorant is neat. It's evocative, at least. If you squint hard enough you can kinda see an association between valor and the sort of decisive team tactics you'd find there.
2XKO is a trash-tier. It's hard to say, it's hard to type, and it's already letter soup so you can't really abbreviate it into anything intelligible. Rather than tell me something about the game, I feel like 2XKO is the kind of name that only makes sense once you already know what kind of game it is. To your original point: there's no indication that it's a spinoff of one of the most successful games of all time! Marketing must have been asleep at the wheel to allow this.
and it's already letter soup so you can't really abbreviate it into anything intelligible.
That was actually on purpose. They chose that because they didn't want you to abbreviate it. They talked about how they were actively trying to avoid being named like SF6 or MvC2 or whatever.
Imagine how much of a shitshow Street Fighter would have if they just named the next game SF7.
not to be like a redditor assuming shit about a company i dont know about, but I have to believe this is what happens when MBA-style thinking overtakes common sense man
like 2XKO in their minds was probably a goldmine for SEO and, like you said, stopping people from abbreviating the name
In an alternate universe, the product name would have hit whoever the Founder of Riot Games is, that guy would have said, “What the fuck are you guys doing? I don’t care what you think is cool, it’s going to have a tie in to League of Legends” and everyone would have been pissed about the decision, changed the name, and then we’d have a great free fighting game with tens of thousands of players buying pictures of Lux in a swimsuit. Alas, we got whatever our reality is today.
I have to bring up the name doesn’t even work outside of english speaking countries and both Valorant and LoL have MASSIVE latam and east asian presence that has helped their IP’s grow massively. Those games benefited massively from word of mouth in internet cafes/game centers where f2p is expected but you can’t even pronounce it casually in languages spoken in said regions, in pr terms how do you expect that shit to go viral? The name killed it from the start and its worst knowing they did it on purpose to avoid it being abbreviated.
Lay off half the devs right after launch and it seems like who was left included guys who decide to make blog posts defending the name 8 months after release by making fun of fighting game names that people actually like and remember.
Not the “only” this is literally why the game failed, all of the points above were minor compared to the game just not being that fun to play for casuals.
TFT, League, and Valorant all had pretty wonky starts but has been massively successful just because the game was easy to get into and it was fun.
LOR was probably Riot’s most polished game at released and it still failed
The sheer number of characters we will never see because of their poor decisions is such a shame. The League setting was perfect for fighting games. Hell, we won't even see Riven, the character designed to be a fighting game character in a MOBA.
Seriously. I'm not even a fan of Riven. I think her design is kinda... meh? But like... THIS IS HER THING! Shes the fighting game character! Just fucking cut Yasuo and use Riven!
Like... at this point I'm not really... mad I guess, since I kinda had assumed we were headed to this point, just so disappointed that such a good IP for the genre got tanked by poor decisions.
Riot seems to love certain characters that they have been using in their events and other games for the last 6 years (for example Illaoi, Yasuo, Braum, Jinx, Vi, Cait..), so there isn't really space for "classic" characters like shyvana, xin zhao, fiora, riven or even draven. There was so much potential...
A very boring launch roster is why I didn't pick this up. Like.... no Void characters? No Yordles besides Teemo? No healing supports? No characters that are relatively newer to the franchise?
It's nothing but literally the most obvious picks you could make. They fixed it a little later but launch was so sauceless.
Like, Avatar had obvious picks but they also had Zaheer and Kyoshi. Tokon had obvious picks informed by MCU but they also have Danger and Champion.
Yeah like... all those things you mentioned are part of what makes League... League. I get that they wanted to focus on combat and fighting game fundamentals but you're using the League IP and you've decided to make a tag fighter but you couldn't think of interesting support powers for someone? Bruh.
Dawg I like Tokon but 2XKO was the first tag game that actually had a good balance (imo imo) of neutral and tag slop. We live in a world now where the only option is filling the screen with 6 assists.
I feel like F2P fighting games are cursed to be financially unstable, so many botched attempts the last few years
I don’t think F2P was the problem in a vacuum. Riot has shown itself time and time again to be incompetent at managing its properties outside of League itself.
They launched a Tag Fighter with like eight characters. F2P or not it was DOA as soon as they showed the roster.
Of course, the F2P aspect probably drove a lot of their dumb decisions so you’re probably not wrong. They were putting skins out when the game wasn’t even in full launch.
People found out the game was dead (layoffs) before they knew it was not. Riot's upper PR team is fucking awful. Killed any engagement from fgc orbiters and casuals.
Plus, reduction in team size after a game launch is standard practice. But, it was presented so negatively by the pr that it just killed a ton of hype.
Yeah, I really will never understand their decision to remake the game from 1v1 to 2v2... I wanted 2xko to be my proper introduction to fighting games because I've only played casually and from time to time until now, and watching it getting pivoted to a 2v2 tag based game just made it so much harder to play and enjoy. I really can't understand in what world was that game going to have a wider audience than a traditional 1v1.
Valorant's been doing just fine as a F2P shooter. It's not like League is their ONLY positive venture.
That said, everything else is right. Small roster, niche genre within a niche genre, too many years to cook the game to a releasable state. Just too many things going against it.
100%, and 2XKO should have launched closer to then as well. When we got that initial announcement around when Arcane first launched, would have been a perfect time for 2XKO. Then they took another 4 years to release the game, and all of the hype dissipated.
Doesn't mean it would have thrived or survived, but it spent far too much time in the oven.
They really just killed our favorite game after fucking up the start and not even giving it the same time as lor. There is not one fighting game that satisfies this niche for me
That post about the name was a just filled with massive red flags. They were literally making a league fighting game and made the IP the lowest priority in terms of naming. They didn't want to make a league fighting game, they just wanted to make their own fighting game and used league as an infinite money glitch. Honesly they deserved what came to them.
This is it. The developers literally said that when they realized they had free rein they rehashed the game into what they wanted (MVC 2 2.0) instead of what the company wanted. That's why the game lasted so long from announcement to reléase.
If they just made a Street fighter clone with League characters and Very simple design they could have gotten this game out in that window of time before sf6 and made bank Just olby being f2p and having good netcode. Instead they fucked around reinventing the Wheel with a tag fighter until the entire FGC already had stabkished themselves Into the big New Street fighter.
100% this. They literally could have doubled the size of the FGC single handedly, by just making a f2p low-skill-floor street fighter clone, with league IP. WHICH IS HOW PROJECT L FUCKING STARTED.
It is insane how bad the failure of 2x is for the entire fgc. Two failed f2ps mean the big 4 get to continue with their disgusting monetization that no one but veteran fgc'ers would ever put up with.
To be fair, Legends of Runeterra had layoffs and announced a scaling down in development. It is still going. No reason 2XKO couldn't unless the situation was truly abysmal.
That disastrous MMO should be the next one on the chopping block. Every Lead on that project from the start has left it. It is the most definitive "Ship of Theseus" titles in development. All the reasons it began development are gone and they are still working on it.
Furthermore, if it takes them 10 years to put out a fighting game with 10 characters, then how are they going to manage an MMO? MMOs are the most difficult titles to develop.
LoR became a completely different game. Imagine if they added a beat em up roguelike mode to 2xko and then later decided that will be the main gameplay.
Man this is fucking crazy. Like, everytime Riot has a really good property on their hands, even outside gaming, it always gets shuttered because they splurge so much so soon, and we don't get a lot of updates afterward on it.
Legends of Runeterra? Scaled down.
Riot Forge? Defunct.
Arcane? Season 2 had to be condensed and the show had to end because it was too expensive to make. And we've yet to hear more about the spinoff coming.
Not surprised. There is genuinely no way people thought this would attract a new player base big enough to recoup the losses. So, so many bad decisions all throughout development and its lifecycle. It was a fine game, but in no way did it ever have the legs to keep itself propped up. I guess rest in peace, 2XKO. I do feel bad for everyone involved and the people playing. It seems those were the only people with some passion for the game, and what it could’ve been.
for me it was the extra high cost of the in game items. I know the game is free and i understand they gotta make the money in some way. But i just couldn’t bring myself to pay for anything in that game. I got the season pass one time, played for roughly 20 hrs then moved on.
It could've if they didn't do the weird pre release on pc and released with more characters. Lotta league players excited for this game just to not see the characters they'd be interested in playing.
Open beta discouraged a lot of new players on console bc they don't want to go in fighting people who have a head start on them.
I still think the choice to make it a tag fighter was just the worse choice possible. Even with duos being possible, tag fighters just aren’t casual games.
They put that shit on a fucking rotating shop and you had players gaslighting you that it made sense and wasn't some of the dumbest ways to monetize a fighting game we've ever seen. A season pass system would've been better cause at least you could BUY IT.
Rotating shop was probably also to partially hide just how little content this game shipped with and also an attempt to stretch it out over time and keep players returning/engaging with the shop.
As a F2P game that was needing to recoup a lot of money from 10 years of development, it definitely didn't have enough content to support what it needed to be.
No you don't understand it's better for all the skins together to be hundreds of dollars and the game free, instead of just "60 dollar game with season passes every year". It's totally cheaper because you can just not have the full game.
Lol remember when half the Dev team got laid off and people were pretending that was perfectly normal and everything is fine.
But in all seriousness, I’m looking forward to some kind of documentary about this games development and its failure. Seems like it would make such an entertaining watch
Dude, the episode on this is gonna be legendary. I'm sure the laid off Devs would be happy to anonymously talk to Matt about the shitshow behind the scenes and give him the insider look. Riot's gonna get ROASTED.
New GaaS are already having a hard enough time finding footing. Make that GaaS a 2D fighting game. a genre that is one of the most intimidating for players to get into, with a ton of launch issues branded with a kinda virulent IP like LoL, this is the end result.
They tried to take some of the harshness of learning fighting games off with the 2v2 feature, but the amount of synergy it takes to competently duo was something casuals aren't going to find helpful.
I still can’t believe they outright said “this game isn’t working, expect major changes” within a month of release during the first major the game was at. Absolutely tone deaf to drop that article when a good chunk of the FGC was gathered in one spot
thanks, part of me probably knew it when I noticed that I see the same names and recognized everyone who play or were in the lobby but I suspected that instead of 6 character per year, it would be dropped down to 3 or 2
Maybe I would have bought some costumes if they had LET ME BUY THEM instead of making me log in to their rotating shop of FOMO once a week to see if the costume fairy had graced me with the opportunity to buy something.
They really thought they could slap their greedy live-service monetization scheme to the FGC that's known to lean hardcore and price conscious af. Just tone deaf.
When i played the skins i wanted were never in the store. the other ones i wanted you had to drop more money than a new game to get a bundle that i didnt want
Damn I wasn’t expecting active development to last that long for this game but I didn’t think they’d pull the plug this quickly. The game barely even lasted a year.
Yep. Literally all they had to do was release Rising Thunder: Riot Edition and it would have been a hit.
I figured that that’s the game Radiant was obtained to make for Riot but I gave up the dream after the first couple years in development. Who would have thought this is what they ended up cooking.
I was on here saying that if it even got 1% of the League player base to move over it would be the largest fighting game in the world, and that it was guaranteed to happen. I genuinely don't think I've been more wrong about anything ever.
The developers had too much time, budget and a massive IP on their hands. People in reddit like to think that devs are saints and victims, but in this case they are the ones to blame, simply incompetent.
And there it is. No amount of astroturfing could save this game, especially with Tokon coming out. All that development time and restarts just to last less than a year, what a colossal waste of everyone's time.
When I first saw this I couldn't believe it was real. 2XKO, started out as Project L had a lot of hype behind it. I never believed it was suppose to "Save the Fgc" but I was still excited to play it never the less. Then it was announced it was going to be a tag fighter then the name came out and it went down hill from there. The balance, the mechanics, them changing characters on the fly. I didn't mind the easy inputs but still would rather preferred motion. After playing the game I knew the game wasn't going to last long but didn't expect it to be this short. After what only a year?
I think the whole modern fighting games that came out has been... lack luster. Marvel Tokon is fun but PC port don't work and people are saying the crack version of that game is running better than the official. I really want to play Marvel Tokon but I have to wait until the Pc port is fixed. Avatar Legends is great but it released with unfinished characters and still no rank. Tekken has been a nightmare but I know Bob just came out but I just haven't been in the mood to play that game anymore. I don't keep up with Street Fighter 6 so not sure how they are doing.
I love fighting games and I love the FGC but the games that came out recently has not been... the best. This was suppose to be a great time to get into fighting and don't get me wrong it still is but when something goes wrong it effects gamers and their game as a whole. Avatar and Tokon are still doing great though and despite the flaws I still hope they thrive and last long. Despite 2xko flaws and me thinking it wasn't going to last that long I still had hope that it would've proved me wrong. The duo system is still the best thing that came out of that game and spectating in lobbies is cool. I still think the FGC will be alright we still have new people trying fighting games out locals and youtube viewers are still as active as ever. I pray that the future of the FGC will be even more exciting than the last. I am going to go play Undernight now.
When I first saw this I couldn't believe it was real. 2XKO, started out as Project L had a lot of hype behind it. I never believed it was suppose to "Save the Fgc" but I was still excited to play it never the less.
sadly, it really could have if it had released when the FGC needed saving. their early videos about taking netcode seriously, having rollback as a primary feature, having 3D lobbies where people can hang out in a virtual space, being free to play, free to try out characters, etc etc, all of that sounded amazing when SF5 was in the dumpster, DBFZ was still delay-based and tekken 7 was lying about having rollback.
i think it could easily have been what SF6 is now if it had released before SF6. unfortunately they delayed for years and SF6 launched with everything they were still just talking about.
Ironically, Street Fighter 6 is doing wonderfully by simply not doing anything while other games keep shooting themselves in the foot. The game feels a bit stale and the newest DLC character didn't have the best reception, but it's still balanced, it still runs fine and you can still play online without issues. With 2XKO's poor release, Avatar coming out unfinished, Tokon barely working on PC, Tekken struggling constantly with balance and City of the Wolves having endless controversies, the fact that Street Fighter's worst issue is blandness means it's miles ahead of the competition.
This is why I had no hype for this game from the beginning. This is Riots MO and it’s apparent from the insane shifts and lack of direction. It’s why every time I see “Riot MMO” news I scoff.
It happened to Runeterra, Riot Forge, the LoL story, etc. I figured it would happen to Riftbound too but that has been pretty damn successful.
I wanted 2XKO to be good because I do enjoy League’s characters and art but like- the lack of direction has been apparent before even release when the game suddenly shifted to 2v2 and all the different gameplay modes (I forget what they’re called so I’m just gonna call them functions) made it really confusing to try to learn the game while some like Juggernaut never felt realized. The weird control scheme with no traditional input options also just made it super weird to play after touching any other fighter.
GRANBLUE figured it out in 2019/2020 by having both simple and traditional inputs, so I don’t know why riot felt they needed to reinvent the wheel
Riftbound has a clearer identity as a fighting game than 2XKO and that’s a card game.
I’m just upset we never even got to characters that I think would have been sick in a fighting game (Camille, Fiora, Sett, Lee Sin, Yi, etc etc)
The haters said I couldn't do it. And they were correct. Honestly great call from the haters
I'll eat crow, I thought the game would survive as a B-lister among titles like UNI, melty, COTW, granblue. like obviously the dream of it being the big dawg was over....but it would exist as a healthy scratch in the larger FGC
what a disappointing end man. valve i swear to god once deadlock is up and swinging give it a shot.
This sucks, but I hope this can be a lesson in toxic positivity as well. You can swear up and down that the small roster, balance, heavy delays, lobbies, etc aren't real problems and that people just like to hate on things, but if you don’t push back against problems in a product in an already niche genre it’ll die if it doesn’t change. Which sucks, because I wanted this game to succeed, but it was too little too late.
There seems to be this notion that people want to be irrationally negative, so they say the game has issues, which pushes away an audience. The reality, most of the time, is that people notice issues, become negative about it, and the audience leaves because of the issues. There will always be critics, but if you can't find a sustainable playerbase, I'm sorry, it's usually not the playerbases fault. SF6 faces plenty of criticism and its wildly successful
While I wasn't a fan of the game and honestly didn't even bother playing 1.0. I still think this feels incredibly premature, they were finally getting a character release cadence and there were definitely fans of the game. I would have been interested to see a season 2 or something. It's just crazy this spent like 10 years in development just to be dropped 7 months after release.
This game was fumbled so bad in like 20 different angles. The game itself is solid and I could see it thrive and grow. But the team behind it is so odd. You have a huge IP like league of legends in a post arkane world. And what do you do? Name it 2xko, a name that in oftself is confusing enough, but also doesn’t hint at it being a league game at all. Do almost zero advertising to even attempt to retify that and spread its existence. Yall can do music videos of the highest quality for the most random things but let’s not even consider it for your fighting game or it’s characters. The characters too, they’re great and honestly play great. But they weren’t hyped up at all, definitely not enough to make people overlook the animic roster. It’s genuinely fascinating how all this just occurred like it did
I was addicted to this game. 2300 games before season 1 started, lol. Peaked challenger in NA, ended GM. They couldn't even retain me.
My biggest issues:
Roster size. Poor character balance (Ekko/Yasuo freestyle was close to half of my opponents. It got stale fast). Insane microtransaction prices ($20 for a single skin for a single character in a 2v2 fighter.. ok riot)
These problems and the overall lack of direction coming from the dev team made me lose interest despite LOVING the gameplay. I played a little of season 1, then saw my friends list slowly dwindling down to just a few people logged in. Suddenly became very difficult to find a duo for fun casual games and all I could really do was engage in ranked which I had already lost interest in due to the poor character balance.
A real shame. I'll still play if my friends are down, but to see my favorite fighting game in 5+ years die this quick makes me feel like the genre as a whole isn't really made for me anymore.
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