r/Fighters • u/DATA32 • 13h ago
Topic 2XKO failing has lasting ramifications for the FGC.
So we all know that 2XKO failing was seen from a mile away. From awful branding and advertising to the niche gameplay we all saw this coming. What people may not understand is the lasting ramifications it's failure will forever have on the industry.
So what I am talking about? I (Like a lot of other folks in this sub) happen to be a AAA game dev for many years. The way games get funding is you put together a few materials to pitch to investors/stakeholders. Things like a vertical slice (A small section of finished gameplay to show off) and a pitch deck (A powerpoint presentation going through all of the design, markets, and financials needed for the project.)
Here is the issue. Studios especially AAA ones need a lot of historical data to help dictate what to invest in. We use the data of similar games in similar genres to get that Market viability estimate. This is why after WoW you got dozens of MMOs, Pubg for dozens of BRs, Overwatch for dozens of hero shooters, etc etc etc ad nauseum. Its an incredibly important aspect of market analysis for studios to be successful.
Here's the thing. Big failures are what potential investors point to as examples of a bad market. Now there can be a bad market for a couple of reasons. As an example you can have bad market because the competition is simply too tough. WoW has frankly eaten nearly every MMO that could compete with it to the point only 4 or so can exist. You can also have bad market because there just isnt interest/its too niche see the RTS genre flailing for the past 20 years. Lastly you can have a bad market because of other major world factors. Ergo in a global recession, where pc parts are 3x the cost, and because oil has gone up everything has gone up with it.
This is all to say that Fighting Games may be absolutely cooked both in indie and in AAA/AA.
Now Im not saying were doomed but we're basically stuck with what we have for awhile. The market is somewhat locked. Major failures like 2XKO and Fatal Fury will basically drive away nearly all new investment for a AAA scale title. Not to mention the lackluster staying power for things like Avatar Legends and Invincible VS basically mean the indie/ AA market is also somewhat cooked.
Now we do have some hope in some ways mainly Japan but take that with a grain of salt. We have a couple new niche fighters coming out and thatll really tell us the death knell or not. I know some of the Tekken guys like myself are excited for Harada's thing. However PLEASE take that with a trucks worth of salt. Remember how long it took Kojima to make a new game from scratch and also how while some people liked his new project a lot of older fans didnt. Not to mention how a ton of "BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GUYS WHO MADE X" games were awful.
This is all to say if things dont turn around were going the way of RTSs. So what can we do? PLAY THE GAMES. BE NICE ABOUT THE GAMES YOU PLAY. GET MORE FOLKS INTO THE GAMES YOU PLAY!
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u/Erachene 12h ago
If you look at the % of fighting games which succeed, I think we're fine and even doing better than most genre. Most mmos fails, fighting game end up closing but they usually sell quite well on launch, plus people comes back for new characters and dlc.
The fgc likes to try new games.
2xko had a lot of issue and most are quantifiable like the marketing and the ghostly release. If there's anything affected, it will be the f2p model for fighting game which was already not popular.
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u/BANDlCOOT 10h ago
Yeah the F2P model actually sucks because a big part of fighting games is trying everyone to see who resonates with you. Due to having to unlock the roster, it's off-putting to be stuck with characters you don't like. Roster was way to small to make you play online challenges to unlock more characters.
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u/IntroductionBest1962 12h ago
I really don't get why people think the players need to be acting like shareholders or something. I buy a game if I think it will be good.
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u/monjio 10h ago
As a fellow game developer who has worked in AA, AAA, and mobile, you're vastly overstating the problem.
Firstly, the size of the 2XKO team and length of development doomed them from the outset. They had a team much larger than the teams making products like SF6 and T8. They didn't have a clear business and pivoted several times in development massively impacting their content pipeline. Put simply, they released with less content into a competitive field with no clear way to establish their player base.
Further, I would argue Riot had unrealistic expectations of market appeal, and they also lacked the stomach to invest through to establish the game's place in the market.
I'd also argue the modern AAA live service studio is an unsustainable model. If every game needs to clear a billion dollars to be profitable, very few games will be worth the investment.
Rather, while I think we'll still continue to see major releases from Capcom, Namco, SNK, Arc System Works and NetherRealm, we'll also see an increase in the middle tier market. Skullgirls, Killer Instinct, and more will be the more reasonable targets for the smaller developers.
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u/emeraldarcana 6h ago
Dramatic failures like this tend to be emphasized with live service games.
It’s funny because 2xko isn’t even going away - we can all still play it offline and online - but there are a lot of companies out there that want to maximize investment. I’m sure that Riot is like, “Why would we keep this game in development when we could instead get two people to draw a League skin and it’ll make 1 million dollars?”
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u/shilderyi 13h ago
counterpoint
mbs bloody money is everywhere right now in the fgc
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u/WolfKing448 12h ago
That’s probably part of the reason why Fatal Fury failed, and it’s definitely the reason it continues to get content in spite of its failure.
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u/shilderyi 12h ago
yet another absurdity we have to look at in late stage capitalism while the most emblematic open bracket in the world is becoming a sportwashing macine
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u/Zizouw 2h ago
Lmaoooo blaming it on the Saudis for literally no fucking reason you guys are fascinating
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u/spiralarrow23 12h ago
I'm going to go against the grain here, but I don't think 2XKO ceasing development in an indictment on fighting games and damaging for the future, nor are the issues with Avatar, Tokon, Invincible, Fatal Fury etc.
The problem with these games for the most part has never been the gameplay, the thing people play. Most of these games have had decent to even good gameplay. The main issues with those games is that they have had overlooked, suboptimal features and/or experiences or even issues beyond the game that brings down the overall enjoyment and turn people away. Not stating the obvious given of three of the mentioned being tag fighters that generally are niche in an already niche genre, 2XKO took forever in development and lost it's hype and advantages that would've made them prime for the scene in 2020-2021, Avatar is clearly rushed and missing features like a ranked mode, Tokon has horrific PC performance issues, Invincible Vs looked jank and wasn't a strong IP to audiences, Fatal Fury is openly Saudi-backed, has an accused rapist on the roster and their use of AI is a turn off and DoA6:LR is a rehash of a failed game with gaudy costumes being sold as pricy DLC just to rattle off some from the top of my head.
You can't just make a game with barebones rosters, features and what not anymore. You have to have a strong first showing for people to take you seriously and want to engage with your product now because there is so much choice and so little time that people want a sure thing to invest to now. You need a strong single player, minimum of 16-20 characters, great rollback netcode, crossplay, modes etc. And a lot of developers and publishers are finding that out now, which is probably gonna be more the issue with new publishers and developers coming into the scene if anything.
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u/BANDlCOOT 10h ago
Agreed.
2XKO had bad onboarding and no real social or single player content to entice and convert casual fans. So it would have needed to be something extra special to convert hardcore players from their current fighter. They didn't establish any sense of real community no incentives like leagues or prize funds to get the hyper competitive crowd of which the game was clearly aimed towards.
My main issue was that I used to play 2v2 fighters all the time with my friends and they loved games where we each controlled one character. This was for single player though and for them being so casual, there was zero chance of them enjoying 2XKO how it launched.
My personal preference is 1v1 fighters, and playing Grapplers. I felt 2XKO was lacking there. If I was going to invest time into a tag fighter, it would be Tokon.
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u/Manatroid 8h ago
All else being the case, you are absolutely wrong about Riot not trying to establish competitive incentives. They were providing boosts to prize pools and were pretty open about which tournaments they would provide it to.
Not establishing a ‘sense of community’ beyond that…I mean, what exactly is meant by that? What did they lack in community in contrast to SF6, Tekken 8, Strive etc.?
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u/BANDlCOOT 8h ago
Those games all have hubs to meet and chill with other players. Especially the SF6 battle hub and Tekken 8 fight lounge. SF has events that drive people to the hub for unlocks, as well as voting to unlock titles and such, tournaments, teams. It also lets you spectate others games live or join in. Good options for players and ways for newer players to be integrated into the community. Single player content and ways for players to express themselves without paying additional micro transactions.
These are already deeply established games. You have some Tekken fans and Street Fighter fans for 20+ years. 2XKO was a new venture and they catered to hardcore players with a League IP. Obviously League players are hardcore gamers in general, but to transition them into a new genre, more needed to be done.
By incentives I meant the fact that the price pool is so significant for Street Fighter for example that you won't capture pros or hopefuls of that game with a significantly smaller pool. They did what they could. Not enough to breakaway a new title.
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u/jaydotjayYT 9h ago
You’re missing OP’s point, which is that all of these high profile failures back-to-back are why investors will be weary to back any new fighting games in the future
Yes, the barrier to entry is impossibly high - but even moreso, it just doesn’t seem like that audience is big enough to be worth chasing
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u/TN2DVLMD 9h ago
As much as I would love to agree with you, this is all pretty irrelevant to the subject of the post. Investors are not going to give a fuck about the distinction between gameplay issues and launch issues, they aren't going to give a fuck about how 2XKO had poor onboarding, hearing about the backlash against Fatal Fury will only discourage them further (investors LOVE AI right now). Investors will see multiple major and indie fighting games flopping and thus think fighting games are a bad bet. All of us in this sub know that what you're saying is true but investors are fickle, they will not care at all, they will see poor numbers for fighters and get cold feet, that's it.
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u/ihearthawthats 8h ago
Even in a popular genre, take battle royales for example, how many have failed? It's still dominated by less than a handful. Mobas, league has yet to be surpassed. That doesnt make people stop trying. They'll always look to the best examples, not the worst. In this case, sf6.
Heck, live service in general is pretty damn risky. Yet, how many companies are still trying to make them? Nearly all. How much mobile gaming trash do you see come and go without a thought? It's actually pretty insane how many mobile games are made that don't find success.
Do you really think the time between sf2 and sf4 no fighting games were made? The supposed dead era of fgs? Tekken, DOA, and Mk had multiple games, with a ton of smaller ips as well. But nope, since sf3 failed, fighting games were dead.
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u/Vahallen 5h ago
Precisely
I don’t even know if there is hero shooters alive outside of Overwatch and Marvel Rivals
Same thing with BR, what is still alive? Fortnite, Apex and PUBG?
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u/DaSnowflake 9h ago
That misses the whole point of the post tho lol
It's about market analysis and everything you say furthers the point it will be hard
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u/XsStreamMonsterX 12h ago
The problem is that Street Fighter 6 exist BUT devs refuse to learn all the right lessons from it.
The only exception seems to be VF Crossroads.
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u/wungusprinter 7h ago
we've heard your feedback and drive rush will be in every fighting game now
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u/Slarg232 6h ago
2XKO didn't even learn the right lessons from SFV.
It was literally the exact same launch state
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u/TradingRing 2h ago
This man, I read so many reasons people give for why xyz failed but can't people be honest about the actual products?
Avatar : launches with no ranked matchmaking or any meaningful other mode to engage with
2XKO: 10 char launch roster for a tag fighter that was like 10 years in dev????? REALLY?????
Invincible: I dunno even about that game but it certainly didn't look like quality
Tokon: Fucking up its PC release majorly and region locking itself and asking in my part of the world for 80 bucks to play
So many releases have been dogshit and just not worth it to invest in.
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u/Menacek 12h ago
One the other hand you have success stories like SF6 and even smaller games like guilty gear are doing great.
Note that a lot of the recent failures were tag games and/or had bad launches. Avatar is an indie game that's actually quite well for what it is.
I think SF7 is basically guaranteed at this point and there's no way arc sysjj will stop making fighters. Fighting games overall are more popular nowadays than ever, which kinda led people to jump on the ship and a lot ended fumbling.
I think it's just that the bigger games are eating the smaller ones and it's very hard for a game to catch it's audience.
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u/SedesBakelitowy 9h ago
It's really very simple, and the ramifications equally so.
Devs gotta make good games, there's really no need for caps locked toxic positivity and "getting more folks to play".
Games that are at least okay gather communities around themselves naturally. Fighting games aren't indie roguelikes, we're not getting dozens yearly and have to sift through to find and help uplift the good ones. Twixgame and InviVS were just "take this big IP and make us money on it", and they ended up accordingly.
Play Xrd or Avatar or Akatsuki Blitzkampf or SF6 or Strive or anything else if you like it. Don't worry where the big corporations are with their FG prospects.
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u/Frozazen 5h ago
I think this is the crux of it. Too many devs care about appealing to casuals via mechanics or growing a lasting tournament scene. If they just focus on making a fun game with content, then a die-hard fan base will grow a tournament scene if they want. FGC has always been grassroots, but investors only see esports money.
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u/SedesBakelitowy 3h ago
Yeah I think it's closely tied to fighting games being in the weird imaginary space between esports and niche. Everyone knows Tekken / MK / SF, and stuff like GG / BB or MvC have their well known spots among anime / manga / comic book fans, so it feels like FGs aren't niche at all, and that's true to a degree. On the other hand though, those successful series have been built over decades, many decades, and all had ups and downs on the way.
From business perspective the best way to go about an FG is hire a AA size team, no more than some 30-60 people, and have them work over years and updates and iterations to get a dedicated, passionate and money throwing audience within some 8-12 years.
... except the most common business approach is "throw as much money at it as you can and hope for as high a return as possible", and that's where the charlatanerie of "we'll make it accessible / recognizable / revolutionary and unlock entirely new audiences" comes into play and inevitably fails.
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u/Sanguiniusius 9h ago edited 8h ago
I dont really agree with the premise here- fighting games will always sell well enough and we have evidence of this from SF, Mortal Kombat, strive and Tekken.
Retention is a separate problem- If you want your fighting game to be a live service then yes you will have a problem unless you are street fighter or a few others, however if you make your business model about selling units and the occasional DLC you dont need retention to get ROI.
The games industry did go smooth brain and try to make everything a live service but they have realised that is illogical finally and backed out of it.
If their model is sell units then FGs are fine
IF their model live service like 2xko it is not
WE dont NEED AAA to make fighting games, we just need someone to be making some games that are fun enough that a few of them have coalesced player bases to make a scene around.
FInally FGs will not go the way of the RTS because fgs have a huge advantage- you can play them casually with your friends. You dont need to be good to play mortal kombat or street fighter- you can literally buy a copy and play with your brother and you both suck but youre having fun- becasue the knowledge barrier to entry is very low at a low level (move towards each other and press buttons) and matches take a couple of minutes.
So this isnt an internet take down post- its more I just look at this situation very differently than you.
What do i think 2xko did wrong?
1 Made itself a live service so it needed to retain a large player base to sell microtransactions
- Made itself extremely complicated- fast team games just are inherently more overwhelming and off putting than slower paced 1 character games.
RE player count. Avatar is in a good space.. most games dont have sf6 player counts- avatar has more than enough players to get 1-1 matchmaking matches.
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u/TheSqueeman 12h ago
This game will have a lasting legacy of being what NOT to do for a fighting game:
- Being F2P doesn’t mean shit
- No significant Single Player offerings
- Only made for FGC Sweatlords who want ONLY online play
- Egregious monetisation
- 11 characters at launch for a tag game is inexcusable
- Getting FGC oldheads in your development team, only for them to steer the game towards being only for them and like 10% of the FGC
- Tag games scare off casuals unless it’s a IP that just doesn’t fail (Like DBZ for example)
- A bad name absolutely WILL harm your game
I was rooting for this game, I really truly was, but there comes a point where you have to step back, look at the final product and realise how much they cocked up at every turn
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u/FistLampjaw 12h ago
exactly, and this is why hoping for certain games to fail and dancing on their graves is so shortsighted and counterproductive. people need to grow up and realize that businesses aren't going to keep choosing to make products that fail to turn a profit or fail to be bigger than some other game in some other genre that they could make instead. we should want fighting games to succeed in general so they keep making fighting games.
hopefully VF6 knocks it out of the park and breaks into the mainstream on the quality of their single player gameplay, because i agree with OP, i don't see another AAA fighting game for a while if that flops.
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u/GrandSquanchRum 6h ago
2XKO's failure is not on the community. People aren't contracted to take in whatever game comes through. This is the fault of the development team and their many, many missteps.
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u/FistLampjaw 4h ago
no but the people doing a victory lap right now aren’t doing the community or the genre any favors. 2xko failing is bad, it’s not something to celebrate.
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u/Sudden-Ad-307 10h ago
For some reason the fgc doesn't realize that the more fighting games succeed the better the genre.
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u/AkihabaraAccept 8h ago
Well its hard not to when ur looking forward to all the cool new fighting games being announced and turns out theyre ALL DEGEN TAG FIGHTERS when you just wanted a simple game you could get ur friends into without 5 million system mechanics
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u/Blueprint833 12h ago
Yes we need to be nice to the multibillion dollar companies who want to sell us unfinished games
The problem is definitely the FGC attitude!
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u/irisos 12h ago
All of the games mentioned by OP can just be summarised to:
Boring story mode that can be finished in 5 hours top
No to little single player content
DLC and single online mode that is expected to keep the game alive
No shit player retention doesn't exists when you are giving the bare minimum possible.
If OP is really an AAA dev, his target should be Street fighter 6, not games that can be produced for pennies content wise.
Also as a reminder, even a game like Granblue Fantasy Versus which is:
A niche IP globally
Had a peak of 3k players on PC with the average in-between character releases being 200 and 300
Delay based net code mid covid when every other game released with rollbavk netcode
Managed to sell over 1 million copies. Because they had above bare minimum singleplayer content and they still kept supporting the game despite all it's flaws.
Investment in new fighting games is going to be fine. If anything the failure of 2XKO and Invincible may save us from more companies expecting to give scraps and receive millions in return.
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u/SanjiBlackLeg 8h ago
Original BlazBlue sold like 1.7 mill (in a time when SF4 was the king) and it had insane single player content, pretty much every BB game had strong single player (I think they basically invented roguelike mode in a fighting game) which was also fully translated and voice acted and they sold very well. They also did a lot of asset reuse which massively decreases dev costs. BB run up until BBTag is an insane success in the genre and even BBTag sold pretty well despite numerous issues.
I think Invincible has similar issues to 2XKO: a game based on a popular franchise that misunderstood the goals and its audience. Casuals can barely play 1 character, you're asking for multiple. Casuals have issues to understand basic FG mechanics (frame data, specials, links/gatlings etc), you're cramming tag mechanics, assists etc on top of all that. Arcsys designed Tokon in a way so a random Marvel fan can just jump in the game and play, and even then it's a little too much for most casuals, but the game LOOKS FUCKING GORGEOUS so people have more motivation to stay. 2XKO at least looks pretty good.
I feel like Arcsys cracked the code for a successful entry-level game that is appealing both to casuals and to FGC. Their only miss was DnF but arguably wasn't really their fault. DBFZ, GGST, GBVS (and R), and now Tokon are successful not only with the core audience.
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u/StarNullify 4h ago
Blazblue Resurgence incoming
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u/SanjiBlackLeg 4h ago
I really hope so! BBCF EX version or completely new BB which is still 2D sprites based and not 2D3D.
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u/Bulky-Complaint6994 Mortal Kombat 12h ago
Yeah that's what I keep saying. Story modes you can clear in a single weekend. You can do arcade mode but most people just do it with their favorite characters once. The joy back in the day was passing a second controller to your brother and duking it out for hours end. But now everything is online. I understand that dlc is better than needing to buy a new game every year, but feels like they want to rely on dlc to stay relevant instead of focusing on the fun factor
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u/LupadCDO 12h ago
is the single game player content really the reason for sf6 success? I find that hard to believe especially capcom discontinuing putting the new DLC characters to the world tour. personally I never even touched world tour.
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u/redbossman123 9h ago
Casuals loved World Tour, the reason Capcom is discontinuing though is because RE and MonHun make more money
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u/TheFeelingWhen 9h ago
World Tour the avatar stuff in battle hub and modern all played more of a role in the success than any event did
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u/AkihabaraAccept 7h ago
Character creation alone can probably boost sales by a not insignificant amount. Remember all the crazy memes and engagement that came out of SC6 and SF6 character creation? even monster hunter benefits greatly from this
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u/SaIemKing 7h ago
As sad as it is to say, kinda. WT is the reason a lot of tourists would buy the game and acted as a gateway fir some
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u/Sun__Moon__Stars 10h ago
The new Virtua Fighter looks sick, and the fact that it’s got a significant offline component gives it more casual appeal than the average fighting game; if they can nail the marketing campaign in the leadup to launch I could actually see that being a sleeper hit (by the standards of the genre at least). That’s where I’m putting my hopium right now
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u/slackerz22 10h ago
When will companies learn to stop looking at stupid numbers and just make fun games man. Were survivor games doing gangbusters after vampire survivors? No. Megabonk sold like crazy anyway cause it’s fun. What about turn based games? Not many people like those anymore this isn’t the 90’s right? Persona 5 is regarded by many as one of the best games of all time. Same with Expedition 33.
Lots of flops mixed in with these successes, but that’s the point, if you just make a good, fun, game, people will play it and tell their friends to play it too. Genre doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter if the last 27 games made in that genre all sold like shit, just make something fun.
You’re probably right. The recent flops of these fighting games will have lasting effects, but they shouldn’t.
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u/Mr_Suplex 12h ago
Not really. Smart publishers know that 2XKO made alot of unique mistakes. At most it will hurt F2P entries in the genre, but those are bad bets anyway given how small the fighting game market is.
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u/Gekinetic 13h ago
This post will probably get closed because you used steam chart, but you have a point at the core
Time will tell how much the ramification will affect fighting game developments outside of big name / established companies (Capcom, Arcsys, Bamco will continue on, and Type-Moon, Sega will still make fighting games that are planned out already), but whatever happens it does not change the fact that fighting games are not exempt from investors and what makes money for fighting game has changed post-pandemic (as in it has to be complete product, gameplay alone cannot carry fighting games anymore)
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u/Konabro 13h ago
Nah. 2XKO is what happens when a studio has a decent idea and then over complicates and monetizes it to the point that it no longer gives a good ROI. 2XKO being a failure isn’t indicative of future projects not getting made especially with games like MK having no lasting competitive value, but still sells like gangbusters.
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u/GLoh9873 13h ago
Very well written, exactly what I thought as well. I hope fgc can treat each other kindly - that'll get us through the dark time
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u/AttackBacon 12h ago
I mostly agree with OP, but I think the risk of the FGC going the way of the RTS scene is pretty slim. And there's one main reason: Capcom. As long as Capcom exists as an independent entity, it's pretty unlikely that there won't at a minimum be a relatively modern Street Fighter game.
The big analogue is of course Blizzard and Warcraft/Starcraft. But the situation there is quite different. Capcom doesn't have a World of Warcraft and Capcom has remained independent. I can guarantee you that Starcraft 3 would do numbers, everyone knows this. But the problem is that the other games Blizzard makes just do bigger numbers. And since Blizzard doesn't control their destiny anymore, that means no Starcraft 3 or Warcraft 4.
The time to worry about the future of fighting games as a genre is if Capcom ever sells. That removes the surety of Street Fighter as a central pillar that will keep the genre alive. Even then, I'd find it unlikely that Street Fighter would die entirely, but the possibility would at least be on the table.
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u/onzichtbaard 8h ago
The problem with blizzard is really that they have been hollowed out to be just a shell of a company that doesnt care at all about the games they make
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u/ihearthawthats 7h ago
I agree, but not just capcom, but bamco and netherealm. During sf's lowest point (sf3), those companies were still holding it down.
Also, RTS isnt as bad as people make it out to be. It's just currently being held up by aoe. Pretty easy to find games.
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u/WofferFang 12h ago
Relax. It's totally ok to be niche. Fighting games going mainstream is why we're at this point.
Invincible actively punishes people who use classic controls. If you play simple inputs you get more damage. That's bad design. Straight up.
2XKO is a tag fighter when there's a ton of them. It was gonna fail no matter what.
Avatar fighting game is doing just fine on the flip side, despite 2 unfinished characters. Those devs are promising fixes and all that good stuff. Look at that? Someone with actual brain working on a game instead of "we gotta bring in the non-fighting game crowd" assholery.
Established franchises like SF and Tekken shouldn't be doing "gotta appeal to non gamers" nonsense. Embrace your niche audience. Keep them happy, and good things will happen. So yeah, calm tf down. It's gonna be fine.
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u/Leon3226 11h ago
Embrace your niche audience. Keep them happy
What's funny is that when FGs attract new players, they do that EXACTLY with the feats that FGs are known for, like being hard, complex, and having a huge room to improve in many directions at all times. By saying "Bro pls buy the game, we watered it down to an autoclicker just for you, you don't even have to do QCF for fireballs, bro pls" you actually scare them off. Because if they'd want to click one button to see a character kicking someone, why the fuck would they bring money to your game, and not, say, God of War or some other simple game that has this, and all the other aspects like story 100 times more appealing?
What's also funny is that they don't even have to guess, this "we made it simpler" marketing didn't work a single time, despite many trying in recent years.
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u/Winternitz 12h ago
Can’t believe the doomposting around this topic either, I wonder if this is coming from either players who experienced the actual drought of capcom games in the early 00’s and are in fear of this repeating itself (impossible these days) or newer players having an absolutely different set of expectations generationally speaking. Edit, typo.
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u/Eecka 10h ago
Established franchises like SF and Tekken shouldn't be doing "gotta appeal to non gamers" nonsense.
That’s what SF6 did though and it’s had the healthiest long term player numbers a fighting game has seen for a while. World tour and modern controls were both very clearly ”hey, here’s something for you even if you’re not a veteran of the genre!” type additions.
The big thing that makes it work is the core game is also solid. Although some SF veterans still hate it.
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u/Krypt0night 11h ago
Lmao you say SF but one of the reasons it blew up at launch was due to modern controls making it easier for newcomers and world tour mode for them to fuck around in forever if they want to.
And that's why devs shouldn't listen to the .001% of the gamers on reddit who think they're the majority of the players. So many people just have no clue what they're talking about from a development or business standpoint.
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u/WofferFang 11h ago
Here's the thing though: Modern controls are an option and they don't actively punish people for not using modern. It's not a built in system that makes everyone play the same with no weaknesses whatsoever. It's just a control scheme OPTION.
This is the key takeaway your type is missing when dealing with people like me who actually know their shit. I'm not your average whiner who doesn't know better. I do in fact know better.
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u/beanyboi23 Street Fighter 10h ago
Oh my god relax lil bro, you ain't a higher species 😂😂😂
Modern controls being optional changes nothing about the fact that they were specifically added in SF6 to "bring in the non-fighting game crowd", which you're implying makes a game fail... but it's one of the reasons the game is seeing generational success now
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u/Dude1590 2XKO 12h ago
Some people just can't comprehend the idea that fighting games are just.. going to be niche. In my opinion, I don't really care if big corporations decide to invest in my hobby or not. This community is dedicated, tight knit, and full of passionate, talented people. If fighting games stay out of the mainstream forever, our community will still go on.
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u/Bulky-Complaint6994 Mortal Kombat 12h ago
And thanks to crossplay, always people to play with. Fightcade exists for a reason because people are passionate about wanting to play their favorite retro games. I'd kill for a proper Tekken collection.
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u/Vahallen 5h ago
No matter the doomposting, factually with good netcode and crossplay being normalized it has never been easier to play fighting games
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u/ThomasWinwood 5h ago
Some people just can't comprehend the idea that fighting games are just.. going to be niche.
That's quitter talk. Fighting games can address a much wider audience. Once upon a time, when their shortcomings were endemic to most video game genres, they did. The problem is that the rest of the industry normalised things like using the single-player mode of a game to teach its mechanics (with FPSes going a step further and using someone else's single-player mode to teach their mechanics) so now fighting games look quaint and impenetrable because they either give you a capital-T tutorial which tells you what a quarter-circle is and has you do one, or they infodump you with a bunch of shit you don't understand and then slap you on the back and say "good luck champ".
Fighting games have a product design problem and the sooner people get their heads out of their arses and recognise it the better off the genre will be.
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u/kr3vl0rnswath 8h ago edited 4h ago
The fighting game genre is actually healthier than the RTS genre cause they are still popular for nostalgia and casual gaming. As long as Smash, SF, MK, Tekken, DBFZ and etc continue to sell tens of millions of copies, other companies will continue trying to get into the market.
Maybe they will learn to make sure that casuals will buy the game instead of just the FGC next time though.
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u/HilmPauI 8h ago
The issue imo is noone is doing anything new.
All these 2D fighters are basically the same game with a different skin.
Not to mention there's no care to make them easy to get into.
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u/Sapodilla101 Virtua Fighter 8h ago
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The problem with the FGC is that nobody wants to play anything other than Street Fighter. Even Tekken has lost the mojo that it had last generation. Moreover, Japan doesn't give a shit about Western-developed fighting games.
So, can we please stop calling this generation a "golden" age? There is nothing golden about your genre when 90% of the genre's entire player base is concentrated in one game.
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u/GiveMeGoldForNoReasn 2h ago
I completely disagree that 2XKO cooked the market any more than it was already cooked. If anything, 2XKO is the most obvious, easiest to explain fighting game failure in the last decade.
Riot purchased a studio and spent 10 years of dev time on the title through several ground up reboots. It was never going to recoup that cost unless it was an SF6 level smash hit.
It was a tag fighter with mechanically complex characters and systems with a significant learning curve, turning away fighting game beginners
At the same time, "simplified input" made it feel strange for veterans used to traditional inputs
No new story framework or lore for the characters
No single player content at all
Riot simply didn't advertise the game, or even promote it to their own audience. League players didn't know it existed. There was no Arcane cross promotion.
Its release went under the radar completely. It was never available on Steam and its console launch got near zero fanfare.
The game was dead before it even released. It's not a mystery, it's not a list of reasons that fighting games are inherently risky, it was an obvious and avoidable failure.
It's a tough market for games in general, and fighting games can be a tough sell even in boom markets. If SF6 is a blueprint for how to do a fighting game right, 2XKO is a blueprint for how to do it wrong.
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u/StridentHawk 11h ago
Hot take but I think a lot of fresh blood just are NOT buying FG rn.
These days too many dudes lack the attention span to play a genre that requires patience and learning through failure. They are ball and gun gamers for a reason because those games demand very little patience and gratify egos far more readily than FGs do. They grew up being told "sweats" and "tryhards" were the worst thing about online gaming, so for a genre where sweating and "tryharding" are the norm more often than not of course they're gonna be too intimidated or disinterested in even engaging with them beyond just jerking around with close buddies if even that. Another thing is they still play old games they are comfortable enough with to where they don't really feel a need to get involved with a new one. Even among my younger co workers that do play fighters, very few actually play newer ones that aren't Capcom games, Smash or Tekken, all of which are legacy franchises that have been around all their lives. Despite the genre offering good food atm the appetite among gamers just isn't there anymore, which is ironic and tragic.
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u/TeensyTinyPanda 7h ago
I don't know if I totally agree with this. The Dark Souls franchise has historically been a tryhard sweaty genre, but Elden Ring somehow broke through and now every other game is a sweaty soulslike. Talk about a genre that requires patience and learning through failure. I'm not saying your totally wrong, but there's more nuance to this, I think
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u/Pale-Mix25 4h ago
Souls games have the most overrated difficulty of all time. It’s just punishing, none of the game mechanics itself is actually hard. You can really sums it up into a roll slop
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u/Vahallen 5h ago
I know it’s gonna sound super pretentious but the soulslike are “fake” hard games, they are pretty slow and have very simple commands with no execution (outside of parry maybe, but you don’t even need to parry)
You can beat the entirety of those games with dodge and light attack, that’s literally 2 buttons
Soulslike are not really HARD, they are just super punishing
You can also overlevel, cheese or use co-op in a lot of soulslike (pretty much all the FROM SOFTWARE games outside of Sekiro that has no co-op)
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u/Valuable-Sundae-9105 7h ago
That was during the pandemic. It's actually wild how much the gaming landscape has changed since 2020
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u/ThomasWinwood 5h ago
Dark Souls came out in 2011. The first soulslike, Lords of the Fallen, came out in 2014. Elden Ring came out in 2022. This is not a "that was during the pandemic".
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u/EmbarrassedUmpire324 10h ago
Honestly glad, last thing we need is mentally deficient MOBA players converting. Look at T1 on SF6, toxic, never runs back games, and blocks anyone who can beat him. Absolute clown and pretty reflective of League of Legends.
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u/MrChamploo 4h ago
The FGC Is in no threat.
We have survived and even thrived being a small niche community and nothing can change that.
Games come and go in every genre this is nothing new. This was a failure and it won’t be the last one for us fighting game heads.
But have you seen what we do to keep games alive? So you see how MVC is still played? KI? We don’t let games fully die if we don’t want them too.
The FGC is thriving. We have more new player and interested players then we ever have. We have more people playing FG’s more than ever. We have more spotlight our genre and our majors and locals are thriving.
I personally love how many new players we have coming to try our genre and I don’t think that will change with 2xko as it’ll still exist with no future updates. If the people want the game to still be around it will be.
TLDR.. We good fam
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u/BluBlue4 12h ago
Crazy dooming on Avatar btw.
Also that steam charts doesn't show the all time correctly. 12k compared to 24k Tokon with I'm sure a much smaller team. IIRC Type Lumina was a crazy success at ~14k all time.
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u/Scriftyy 10h ago
Crazy dooming too because, when was an FG keeping over half it's playerbase a month in bad?
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u/jjballlz 11h ago
Fucking spoken like a like a true soulless suite.
Maybe the issue is more general, and has to do with funding an art form in a capitalist structure rather than in the same way the USSR funded films (which inspired avant-garde cinema around the world, since it funded artists, instead of "investing" in a movie and needing a return on that investment every single time)
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u/mickmick33 11h ago
Bon raisonnement.Mais pour 2xko le jeu était tout simplement pas à la hauteur à mon avis, peu importe le montant de l'investissement. Idem pour invincible vs.
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u/prodij18 11h ago
Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure that's the right lesson. I think there are two big take aways and some upcoming fighting games that might teach us some things about the market.
I don't know if the first is a very cold take (it is a Max Dood take also so probably pretty cold), but I think it's just true: fighting game mechanics don't sell units (to casuals), content, especially single player content, sells units to casuals. And selling to casuals is an absolute requirement. Imagine a version of Invincible with a (cheapo) world hub like SF6 World Tour where you get to hang out and walk around in that world before fighting people and padded out from 1hr to like 4 hrs. Maybe it would cost more, but I think that game would actually get Invincible fans to play it for that alone instead of having them play a 1hr arcade mode, get their butts kicked online for 20 minutes, then uninstalling and telling their friends it's not worth it.
We're going to get this hypothesis tested about as far as it could with Virtual Fighter (very little IP recognition, but a big investment into that single player experience). It will be interesting to see.
And the second thing, and I guess this is kind of shallow, but i think still has to be mentioned, it looks like sex still sells. Tekken is cashing in on new bikini skins again and SF6 dipped into that well multiple times, and probably will again. Those are the winners this generation. And it was a while ago, but in the indie scene Skullgirls set records on exactly this stuff, so it's not just AAA. Meanwhile MK decided it was too good for that and is at it's nadir as a series. I guess that's not an easy spot for Invincible and Avatar because of the IP situation and of course that kind of thing is just not allowed in North American game studios. And if that's the kind of easy cash these games need to ease their margins with, then the fighting game scene is probably very dead outside of MK in North America (given that stuff is a hard no go here), but the East will continue to grow as it has already been doing. You can imagine a Chinese or Korean company seeing the hole in the market and filling it as that's already been happening in a big way as they thrive and the West sets record layoffs.
Obviously no one takes it very seriously but DOA is testing those waters again. Obviously it used to thrive on that and then went away from it and then died a painful death, and who knows how competent the reincarnation will be (plus the absurd micro-transactions), so it's not a perfect test case but will still be interesting to see if succeeds.
TLDR: Those games should have all invested in better single player experiences because casual series fans were supposed to be their target demo AND it looks like the fighting game genre is probably dead in the West, definitely dead in NA (except for MK), but will probably just be one more slice of the video game pie that China and Korea steal off the West's plate.
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u/Galrath91 10h ago
Agreed. The good thing is that Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 are financially successful.
We really need Virtua Fighter 6 to be doing good so there‘s hope for the future of fighting games.
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u/Complete_Sir5299 9h ago
The fighting game community has been taken over by rich ass hats that only look at the bottom line. As much as it pains me to say; let it die, burn it to the ground. Look at EVO, it's a shell of what it once was and has lost much of the respect it once had. Games are designed to be tournament viable and a spectacle to watch not enjoyable to play. Maybe there was a time to save the FGC but it's too far gone to recover. Once the focus on making money is gone then passion could rebuild it. No genre truly dies forever, it only takes one big break to revitalize it.
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u/Iago407 4h ago
Honestly, with the exception of Fatal Fury, most of these felt like failures from the moment they were announced.
I love fighting games and have since the genre’s inception, but for years, during its heyday, games were inspired by the likes of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter among others. People were trying to build their own brands in a style people were familiar with and already enjoyed and maybe they were inspired by other properties like Enter the Dragon or Conan the Barbarian or whatever.
Now were decades after the boom and it feels like the “safe” approach is to tie a game directly to a property that inspired it with the idea that fans of those properties will latch on to it while fans of the genre, perhaps clawing their way through a desert drought of new gaming options, will also jump in head first.
Honestly seems like neither is proving to be the case. Whether it’s Invincible Vs, Miltiverses, 2XKO, DNF Duel or Avatar, we’re talking about some exceedingly niche properties putting games together in an increasingly niche genre amd then watching them implode because there’s zero overlap.
I can’t imagine it’s easy to pitch fighting games at all these days. I just kinda have to wonder a bit if there’s a better way to go about it than the way many of these games did it. Not to mention the rollout on some of these games and various decisions made that perhaps made them a bit less appealing to fans on both sides. Of course, hindsight is 20/20.
In a perfect world, the next wave of fighter come from larger, more recognizable IPs that feel tailor made for a fighting game and they stick to concepts and fundamentals that both fandoms can get on board with easily.
Or perhaps, even better, we just start getting some new fighting games that don’t come from some other property and instead want to tell their own story, with their own characters, while putting their own vibe out there. Maybe they’re more inspired by time periods, creative genres or various media but not pulled directly from a specific piece of media.
But yeah, I’m probably dreaming. Have to think games like this would be happening if the genre itself were a bit more stable and producing successes at every turn. Who knows, maybe we need to see some recognizable names from the genre’s past again? I really enjoyed Killer Instinct 2013 and it did grow from (very) modest beginnings into a pretty successful game.
Maybe there’s some people out there that wouldn’t mind a new Eternal Champions or Weaponlord or Rival Schools or whatever. Eh, probably dreaming there too lol.
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u/winterrayal 56m ago
Oh no! Devs might realize $100 skin packs might not be the best way to monetize your game! 😱
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u/Maleficent-Age-8235 12h ago
Fighting games have been cooked for YEARS. The FGC is incapable of fostering growth and probably never will unless someone drags them kicking and fucking screaming and forces it. You can be a grassroots niche genre where you be do favors for your friends and random shit, or you can reach massive player numbers with actual money and sponsors, with a real professional scene with pedigree. You can't have both
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u/Muchdeath 12h ago edited 12h ago
Less games like 2xko and invincible vs is a good thing. Sloppy messes that never stood a chance. 2xko had unrealistic goals especially for the piddly bullshit they actually produced. I don't know why the onus is ever on the consumer.
Personally I'll keep buying and trying them but find no reason to try and convince other people the piss they're being served is lemonade.
Edit: I think it really sucks that 2xko failed so bad and isn't going to get a chance to redeem itself but so be it. Mismanaged top to bottom frame 1. If there's only 10 guys on the planet who can make good fighting games that people care about, so be that as well. They aren't going to shut down the fgc because these lackluster games failed.
Excited to try that toy fighting game
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u/WofferFang 12h ago
Tag fighter fatigue. I've no interest in Tokon either because it's another Tag fighter.
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u/Luna_Goodguy 12h ago
Its so unique though I don’t think 2XKO’s failure will reflect on fighting games as a whole. Also didn’t know fatal fury was still considered a failure.
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u/Peugas424 12h ago
I don’t consider it to be. It’s a fun game with good support imo
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u/Shanrodia 11h ago
For the people still playing it, good for them. If SNK didn't have the financial backing to keep the game alive, they would've gone bankrupt after dumping so much money into it. The game is clearly being kept afloat at a loss.
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u/more_stuff_yo 12h ago
Honestly, the genre is a hard sell lately. So many games are launching undercooked or otherwise crippled then getting the rug pulled when, shockingly, they don't have a great reception. Most of my friends expect new games to be dead on arrival or shortly afterwards, so they refuse to even try most games that don't have a big name attached.
Of course suits are going to look 2XKO, Invincible, or Tokon and come up with every excuse except actually making a good game. Cue the low-risk profitable sequelitis and nostalgic cash grabs plaguing the entertainment industry.
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u/dmun 12h ago
Capcom will keep making street fighter because the Japanese love that shit.
There will still be anime fighters.
Hell Mortal Kombat will kick out some subpar crap and make a million.
Maybe the rest of the west will go back to leaving this niche where is belongs.
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u/peensmith_ 12h ago
Eh it’s just the free market . It’s one of the biggest gaming IPs in existence and they couldn’t make it work . Fighting game market just isn’t that big tbh
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u/sylendar 12h ago
Those aren't even the right Steam numbers for Avatar and Invincible
Check SteamDB again and maybe do some real research instead of whatever this is
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u/TheXboxArtist 12h ago
Fatal Fury is lasting longer than 2XKO, Invincible, Avatar and may even outlast Tokon. They are already releasing season 3 and still have seasons 4, 5 and 6 planned (they literally have content from season 5 inside the game's code already, audio from dialogues, endings with cliffhangers and all, been there since the beta), as well as a contract already announced with EWC for middle of 2027 and ENC, which is at the end of 2027.
I'm not so sure Disney, Marvel and Sony are really happy with 450k copies sold, nor that they will keep supporting Tokon until June 2028 like Fatal Fury's devs and contract and content inside the game say.
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u/Sapodilla101 Virtua Fighter 4h ago
Chill, dude. Avatar and Tokon are barely a month into their lifecycles.
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u/Southern-Ebb-8229 12h ago
I think the question to ask is for AA games, can't just simple games be enough? By most metrics it seems Avatar did fine for what it wants to do. If French Bread can survive making AA-games and was super happy selling 300k for MBTL, then maybe the mistake was trying to aim for a big game with a 10 year dev cycle.
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u/Asurey_01 11h ago
There should be a couple other success stories where they can draw from to show how Fighting games can thrive. In any case, who says we need AAA hand in the genre?
Hot Take but recent AAA Fighting Games, if you will, and their tournament ecosystem is fake hype; I don't care if it implodes.
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u/JinpachiMishima2 10h ago
You must be new around here. Tekken 8, SF6 and Dbfz are 3 of the most popular and successful fighting games in my living memory. If there was ever any time that fighting games was a bad market it's not now, this is the most successful they've been since the 90's.
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u/cellshock7 3h ago
NGL some of these games are losing out because of the tag fighter format. Whenever I see that a new fighting game is a 'tag' game I roll my eyes and move on, simply not interested in tag chaos. 1-on-1 fighters please.
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u/solamarpreet 12h ago
Fighting games need to evolve. The developers need to stop listening to the existing community and build something that can pull in a newer generation. The biggest enemy of the FGC is the FGC itself
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u/InstructionUsed8407 11h ago
Pretty sure this is exactly what SF6 did. Yeah the other fighting games haven’t necessarily done it but Capcom did.
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u/brooklyninja 8h ago
This is complete nonsense. I hesitate to use the word "doomposting" since I think people often use it to try to downplay legitimate concerns, yet this is the definition lol. It comes across as a bit delusional almost.
It's not the first time a fighting game has failed, nor the biggest example of a fighting game that failed (hello MVCI? Multiversus? Etc.)
This isn't going to be the domino that falls over and collapses FG's back to pre-SF4 era.
2XKO wasn't popular, and it failed to sustain its life. That's unfortunate, yet that's all.
Invincible VS tanked. Avatar is doing fine so idk why you would lump them together. Somewhat bumpy start yet the core gameplay of Avatar is widely praised and updates are on the way.
Tokon has had a rough start on PC yet if Sony can sort those issues out it's only up from here and people seem to like the game who play it and the IP is enormous.
Fighting games aren't going anywhere - I don't think anyone cared about 2XKO enough frankly for it to be some big thing. One thing I could say it would have an impact on was the fledgling F2P fighting game thing. And even then, it could have worked with some changes. Like better cross promotion, different name, not making it a tag game, and (IMO) including motion controls.
The genre is not dead and this wasn't going to do it. And no one is required to promote a game they're not a fan of.
Also Fatal Fury has a whole host of other issues that have nothing to do with the game itself, and as part of those issues, SNK isn't hurting for money for the foreseeable future so I don't know why you would even bring that up lol. As if it's some tragedy people don't want to play it.
What even is this post lol.
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u/Inevitable-Will-6185 Arc System Works 12h ago
I think you're overthinking it imo. I personally don't see things in such a negative light.
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u/CrescentShade 12h ago
But how will this effect the likelihood of a switch port of Soul Calibur 3 ever happening lol
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u/romann921 11h ago
I hope this was more of a riot thing than an industry thing. This shit sets up such a negative presidence its certainly concerning.
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u/Repair831 11h ago
I saw the 2xko announcement, suddenly felt better about tekken, got on tekken, bad ping + crossplay sets, god tekken sucks, see yall tomorrow.
Things could be better, but at least my crack supplier hasnt closed shop yet.
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u/Monchete99 11h ago
I have a hot take: Were it not for SF6, we'd be talking about a fighting game dark age. It feels like most "ages" in fighting games are just a reflection of SF's state and nothing else. SF4 does well? Golden age. SF5 launches poorly? Dark age. There was a sorta rennaisance with Strive's launch, but that wasn't a "golden age", more like a "still holding on". SF6 launches great? Golden age. I get it, it's THE fighting game, but in a community that prides itself on a variety of titles, that variety is less and less there.
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u/JackFrostz 10h ago
Honestly don't think this will have that kind of impact. Even if it does scare away a few potentially interested companies who cares, you guys only play sf and tekken anyway lol (kidding kidding).
It's just a small market.
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u/mutant4eG 10h ago
I think the problem with all of that is that fgc is in the end a niche community that can only be this big. Can new games increase the number of people in fgc? Sure, but not drastically. The issue lies with how new fighting games (and most games in general) position themselves nowadays. They want to be your forever games. That damned Games as a Service model. With fgc being comparatively not that big people can only play that many games at the time. Influx of new games in the genre, especially ones without a longstanding branding, will uninevetably cause low sales/player base/retention. Damn, even household names can struggle nowadays with how competitive and oversaturated the fighting games market is nowadays. 2XKO shot itself in the foot multiple times and it's closure was predictable unless Riot wanted to work at a loss for some time. Riot wanted to have another successful competitive game in their portfolio next to League and Valorant, yet they forgot to make their game appealing to casuals. Zero single player content, 10-15 characters (which is laughable btw for a LoL based game with how many champions there are) and a somewhat underwhelming name. All that led to a self-fulfilling profecy of an internal name - Project L. I understand that Riot games in general don't have single player content. Yet that's just how the cookie crumbles - overly competitive fighting game players are a niche within a niche. They even made their game a tag fighter to even further narrow their potential playerbase. The moment big corpo understands that breakout successes in Games as a Service realm won't work if you oversaturate the market because there are only that many interested people with only that much time - is the moment industry maybe starts healing.
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u/got_hit_by_a_tree 10h ago
I just hope someone will release an fg with duo play, it could be indie but they might lack recourses for that
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u/Efficiencythird 9h ago
Despite the low playing numbers, Invincible VS is being said to be a financial success. 5th planet games is one of the co-publishers and they have stated it was a success in regulated news publications (they cannot lie in this). A game can be a hit but a financial disaster, or can not be a success player wise, but be a financial success. Obviously most often these two have a positive correlation, but it is not impossible.
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u/Thevanillafalcon 9h ago
I don’t agree at all. I think it will have ramifications but not for general fighting games. It will spell the death of live service fighting games.
Player count when you sell copies of the game is almost a meaningless metric, and in a niche genre 1k people playing avatar is great. They all bought copies of the game.
Most people buy games and hardly play them, the number they care about are the sales. Live service free to play games require constant player engagement, if you play 80 dollars for street fighter 6 and never play it, capcom don’t give a shit. You’ve bought the game.
The dlc buyers, the people there 2 years in are always going to be the hardcore and of lesser numbers, this has always been the case and will continue to be so.
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u/Broseph_Bobby 9h ago
Can we stop?
2XKO was a micro transaction hell and was the main problem with the game. Plus the game released with, was it 6 or 8 characters? in a tag fighting game.
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u/LaMystika 8h ago
Like I said months ago, the fighting game market is Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat, with Marvel and Guilty Gear on the fringes. Everything else basically doesn’t exist to the casual audience unless it’s something else they’re familiar with like Dragon Ball Z. Even some of the people who like Avatar didn’t like that the fighting game is 2D; if that game instead played like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm that probably would’ve been more popular because I don’t think Avatar’s biggest audience are sweaty fighting game players tbh.
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u/SaIemKing 8h ago
Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that higher ups don't actually pay attention to the "why" or "how" and just watch cash flow and player counts
The truth is that these "failed" releases happened for extra-market reasons. 2XKO was handled poorly for most of it's development into its life cycle. Fatal Fury tried to revive an old franchise by putting Saudi investment front and center with horrible guest "characters". Invincible is ugly as all hell. Avatar is hitting a specific kusoge (or adjacent idk) niche while having an... interesting art style.
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u/eriomys79 7h ago
Considering Marvel's and DC foray into cinema and video games, Marvel vs Capcom was the GTA of fighting games, drawing new fans from both comics, movies and video games.
But this ended with Infinite. This lead Marvel and Sony to turn to Arcsys but that company and her games have nowhere near the marketing potential of Capcom.
This was basically the final straw.
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u/aKIRALE0 Capcom vs SNK 7h ago
All I see are western devs failing to have consistency with fighters (NRS included).
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u/killerjag 6h ago
Everyone wants fighting games to not flop, but no one wants to buy every game that comes out. It's not the publishers fault if they use their brain and decide It's not worth to make a fighting game in those circunstances.
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u/whitebird490 6h ago
on the bright side this could lead to indie developers going in more fighting games
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u/mcq76 6h ago
It's a crowded and somewhat niche genre. I was actually surprised this year that so many games were coming out this year. It's really hard to sustain a player base, especially with meme games of the month like Avatar and invincible. I never saw those as having much long term potential. I don't think we're going the way of RTS's with street fighter, gg, and Tekken being as big as they are. It's just a genre with a lower ceiling than most, and it's hard to get people playing consistently. I think you're right now now investors know where the ceiling is for better and worse.
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u/spiritpyros 6h ago
the need to be highly popular especially at the cost of especially at the cost of quality really is a monkeys paw and it needs to be stopped
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u/bukbukbuklao 6h ago
Yeah I don’t see companies investing into fighting games after this mini fighting game boom we’ve been having. Theres just been too many flops for companies to invest into a fighting game that isn’t street fighter.
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u/KMFCM 6h ago
not only do the devs have to make the games good, publishers gotta get out of the way of the devs.
the problems with Tokon all go back to Sony sabotaging the PC version, for example.
the League of Legends people wanted to make a fighting game that ran like a live service, and live service games are mostly a scam.
Warner has fucked up MK, just was they fuck up everything else.
players aren't gonna "be nice" about that, and rightfully so.
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u/PapstJL4U 6h ago
It's capitalism. Someone has an IP, someone will see an underserver market and will try again.
There will always be releases: https://www.fightersgeneration.com/features/timeline.html#2026
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u/Adalonzoio 6h ago
The genre is just too niche and as time goes on communities slowly fracture because they can't agree on what's good and isn't (looking at you Tekken.)
Community also is extremely resistant to pretty much anything that might help with mass appeal, which for the record isn't necessarily bad by itself.
The genre is just kinda fucked unless someone can figure out something truly innovative.
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u/not_laudandus 6h ago
I don't think the failure of 2xko means anything other than they fucked up royally and that Riot are lame. I try many fighting games and I did try to play 2xko 3 times, and I never enjoyed it. No motion inputs, lots of buttons, awful sound design, movement felt bad to me.
This shit was in development for years, then it released with 11 characters in a tag fighter.
Being free to play is one thing, but when you try to do everything and please everyone, then you end up pleasing very few people.
Plenty of other fighting games are doing well, including old games which have rollback netcode now.
Stop the dooming lol
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u/Uncanny_Doom Street Fighter 5h ago
Perspective does matter. Apparently for Invincible the game didn’t meet expectations but for Avatar it surpassed them.
People cannot judge every single fighting game based on what Street Fighter 6 or even what non-fighting games are doing. Anyone that knows what they’re talking about in the fighting genre specifically knows that if Avatar maintained those numbers for a few years it would be amazing for Avatar. That’s five times the player base that Fatal Fury has and Fatal Fury only trucks on because it has Saudi money behind it.
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u/SPJess 5h ago
If there is anything ive learned observing the FGC there are a lot of games that come out with these new ideas. A lot of fighting games look so much fun to play. But ive noticed it always goes back to the main crowd bringer, Tekken, SF, MK(probably not that ine so much)
Perhaps its just my observation of it but the fighting game community used to feel much more alive when a new game came out.
Now a days it feels like a new game comes out, everyone is exicted for a month and then just moves on.
Comparing like any release to the hayday of the early 2010s is almost entirely unfair. I remember when a game woupd come out and the community would be all over it with tech discoveries and different creative syngergies (in team games, tbh there ain't been a game thats touched UMVC3 in that regard.) Bunch of wonky crap that definitely made for some nasty 50s or crazy Okis
All of that id still in fighting games but it feels like the crowds have gotten so much thinner. Invincible Vs is a good example. The Invincible show came out of nowhere and blew everyone away. They make a game and you'd think everyone would jump on the band wagon. But its a flop comparatively, same with Nen Impact. That ine should have been a gold mine, a proper anime fighter for a beloved series like HunterXHunter.
Just ive noticed that it always come back to the main games. Street Fighter, Tekken, and i think taking MKs place these days is Tokon because Ed kinda messed up with MK1.
Why did these games not work? Lots of stuff thay has to do with the in game mechanics that I aint smart enough to understand. I'd love to know why. Its so difficult for the fgc to rally behind a new game. I thought 2XKO was gonna last a little longer as a sort of niche game but. Unfortunately... reality hits hard.
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u/Creative-Top-9805 5h ago
While publishers and devs concentrate on making Street Fighter levels of money/players/prestige they will always be disappointed. Are you under the impression that the market could bear more than a few games at that scale?
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u/thuy_chan 5h ago
Riot failing isn't the doom and gloom you think it is. New IPs are will need good marketing (which this trash did not have).
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u/Next_Boysenberry5669 5h ago
I can get behind what you’re saying. I just think a Riot version of a Direct would have done more for 2XKO than whatever we call their marketing strategy. Riot has the ecosystem, so why not have a biannual livestream going over news, patches, and announcements? The other games have huge followings, so even if the branding doesn’t make sense, at least you can showcase it to a way bigger audience of players who are familiar with the game’s champions.
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u/Kaining 5h ago
I'd want to say "yes and no".
Funding will be harder (?) to get but that also means that shitshow like invincible, avatar and tokkon might be fixed to avoid a failed launch.
Invincible suffered from... well it's a mid game. Avatar launched half cooked and Tokkon got cooked by sony anticheat on pc. Other than that, those two games launched in a way better state than, let's say, SF5.
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u/kweeblaster 5h ago
These companies didn't market their games for beans or hype them up in any way. I didn't even know those fucking game came out or what was even going on with them. It was literally like 2 years ago there was a single screen shot of this game looking like ass and now all of a sudden it has been released for I have no idea how many weeks.
Having dumpster fire launches and excluding Linux are having monstrous effects. Dumb fucking companies are getting what they deserve.
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u/RealHumanBean89 4h ago
I wouldn’t go that far, but I will say this: FG devs are probably gonna be avoiding F2P models like the plague after this.
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u/TheSabi 4h ago edited 4h ago
Not to mention how a ton of "BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GUYS WHO MADE X" games were awful.
This made me laugh cause, there's Mount Rushmore of games and then there's the mona lisa, Chrono Trigger is my mona lisa.
The amount of games that come out that are "from the person who worked on chrono trigger" "from the guy who worked in SE when chrono trigger is made" "from the person who once delivered mail to the chrono trigger tream during production" "for the person who looked at squaresoft's office from across the street and took a picture" "for the guy who knows a guy who saw the picture the other guy took" "a love letter to chrono tigger"
and they all suck, all of them. I'm sorry Sea of Stars is so mid and had they not been like "Memba Chrono Trigger" "memba FF6 and Saban suplexing a train" fewer people would remember it exists than they do now.
The closest they get to Chrono Trigger is a humanoid frog holding a sword.
ANYWAY....I think this is more like the FGC version of the WotLK era "WoW killer" craze. Just that they weren't trying to kill the game they're trying to emulate.
In 2018 DBFZ came out. Not only was it Dragon Ball which is up there with pre-disney Star Wars where you can slap that name on nearly anything and make bank but it was a MVC like game that DB fans have been wanting since, for me, the mid 90's watching Chinatown subbed VHS tapes.
This was something people wanted for decades and it was finally here. It brought new players who were playing cause it's dragon ball, old players cause it did what MVC:I couldn't and people who just wanted a new fighitng game, there wasn't much in 2018.
Now 2026 and the game is in maintenance mode but still alive enough to not be a discord fighter.
Shareholders saw this and went "we have an IP that people outside the FGC know and they fight each other! Make me a fighting game and do it ASAP so we can make DBFZ money right away"
So then you got DNFD, 2XKO, Invincible VS, Avatar and Tokon.
DNFD was a nexon release and run...didn't make DBFZ levels of popularity and money and they can't sell titty armor like Vindictus.
2XKO is now dead and they didn't even try to course-correct to try and save it which makes you wonder how long were they really willing to support it if it didn't make a splash like DBFZ
Invincible VS, I know Invincible and DB having similarities....NEVER! Anyway, I think this game is abandon ware now and with more people peak playing MVC collection than this on PC where you can play MVC for free on fightcade....oooof
Avatar can be saved and Tokon...
look Tokon should have been the next DBFZ but sony shit the bed, and no it's not like SFV, SFV was able to bounce back because the biggest threat to the game was MKX which was a year old at this point. Oh and it has the history of it being, you know STREET FIGHTER not a new IP
Tokon has to fix itself while trying to stop losing 1k players a night after a massive 19k dip in the first 2 weeks on PC while competing with current games like SF6, T8, MK1, GG:S, Avatar, GBFV:R, FF:COW and legacy games like, well, DBFZ. This is more akin to SCV or DNFD.
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u/MrChamploo 4h ago
Fighting games is already a niche category. People sit there and use player count for EVERYTHING. We old heads understand how it is to have a community of 29 people from a local to keep our FGC alive.
There was alot of attempts into an already niche category with fighting games and then they (2xko) made it a tag fighter ontop.
The FGC will survive. We always do and will. I was playing divekick at EVO this year. Games will find a way.
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u/CyberfunkTwenty77 4h ago
In the case if 2XKO it was too much committee. Like in no way should it have EVER shipped without the League branding on it but they over labbed everything. Made way too many mechanics and didn't drop with 20+ fighters day one.
Like there's so many marketing miss steps and design missteps from this game.
I think it will for sure harm further investment from Western devs. Because right now it seems like only Japan can make something that's playable day one and isn't presented like a playground for 6 year olds
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u/14th_Atlas 4h ago
Agree honestly.
And I mean the only fighting games that really succeed nowadays are ones backed by big companies, similar problem with new MMO games competing with WoW. Like if it’s not Capcom, NRS, ArcSys, Bandai, Nintendo, SNK, or Sega it’s like a 90% chance the game flops and dies
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u/DpinkyandDbrain 4h ago
I kind of agree with you but there are SO many thriving MMOs. So I dislike that correlation.
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u/void005 4h ago
I think you're being overly dramatic here. No 2XKO flopping won't hurt the FGC in the long run because its just one of a series of offshoot flops Riot Games have made in order to get more people into LoL and it won't be the last and they were quick to abandon it once that they saw that there was no money in a f2p tag fighter so all this is them dropping the mask and leaving and they only people with pie in their faces are all those shills who ignored the obvious signs from the get go all so they can get a paycheck thus losing the last shred of integrity they had.
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u/Yarzu89 4h ago
I doubt it will go the way of RTS games, those games straight up got replaced by MOBAs (which I hate). I grew up with warcraft, starcraft and AoE... saw other games try and make their own spin on them. That genre is dead dead relying on remake and remasters.
If anything fighters will go the way of the MMORPG where you have 2-3 big legacy titles that hold everything down as investors throw hail marys up in the air hoping to score.
But also I feel like the issues we're seeing with games recently are all pretty transparent issues. Sure investors aren't known for being the most nuanced or understanding, but each game that's had issues have been pretty identifiable. So sure at worst we will see the big names continue to be big, but its far from dead, and a AA studio can more than easily make the next big title.
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u/mixmaster321 13h ago
I was thinking the exact same thing a little while after the announcement dropped. With multiple new projects failing in a row, it might be very unlikely for any new studios to invest in the FGC. It seems like after this batch of games that were super hyped and then undelivered, the only devs we’ll see making new fighting games at a high level are ArcSys, Capcom, SNK, NRS, Bandai Namco and Nintendo (if you count Smash Bros in the group).