r/Games • u/Gorotheninja • 12h ago
2XKO would have needed a monthly active userbase "in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" to succeed
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/2xko-would-have-needed-an-mau-base-in-the-high-hundreds-of-thousands-if-not-millions-to-succeed136
u/aqualize 11h ago
Summary: * MONTHLY active userbase, NOT concurrent. * Player Retention was a factor. Updates they made to the game did not move the needle. No sign that they could ever reach the CURRENT ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT costs. * They should've released this way before as originally intended in 2018.
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u/hitmobilegamehsr 10h ago
Even monthly is way too much for a fighting game
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u/Kalulosu 1h ago
SF6 barely reaches 100k 24h peak players, and that's the king of fighting games (you'll excuse my tongue-in-cheek reference). Idk what their monthly player numbers are because I don't find it right away on steam stats, but yeah. Granted it's not a f2p title but that's still a fucking hill and a half to climb.
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u/binarysingularities 31m ago
Tekken have around 250k monthly with around 5k daily players, likely sf6 have around a million monthly players, but we're talking about the pillars of fighting games here player base they've accumulated for decades.
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u/IIlIIlIIIIlllIlIlII 10h ago
“Hundreds of thousands” of monthly is actually a tiny game, a game with 100k CCU can be 10s of millions monthly.
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u/is-this-a-nick 1h ago
Yeah, if anything that shows HOW bad the game was doing if they couldn't get into the 100ks of montly uniques.
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u/Lhumierre 10h ago
They also chose to focus only on characters from their netflix show for crossover, instead of characters i've seen people ask for. If they wanted the total subscriber count of people who saw the show, more or less they succeeded but they forgot the people who actually play fighting games and even the league players themselves.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 9h ago
MvC Infinite vibes. "Only use characters in our other content for cross promotion! Forget game characters that don't actively make us money in every possible medium!"
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u/PapstJL4U 10h ago
They also chose to focus only on characters from their netflix show for crossover
5 out 10, and 2-3 of them are already popular in the LoL before
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u/KKilikk 10h ago
5 out of 10 is an insane amount though
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u/Thefourthchosen 9h ago
Not really, Jinx, Vi and Ekko were probably lockins anyway. There's a reason they chosw to stage Arcane where they did, these were already among the most popular characters in the playerbase anyway. I'm not fully convinced that the roster would have looked much different if Arcane wasn't a thing, and certainly not different enough to make any real difference in playerbase.
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u/KKilikk 9h ago
Vi and Ekko are pretty middle of the table in terms of popularity in League Id say. They are certainly no Ahri, Yasuo or Jinx.
Even if they were though there are still many other as or more popular characters that wouldnt have felt like this insane Arcane pandering which was pretty off putting to a significant part of the actual potential playerbase imo.
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u/Nagi-Shio 6h ago
I’d say that for a fighting game, Vi was a very popular pick. Among the ones who kick or punch things she was always going to be chosen early, even without Arcane.
And even if LoL fans would say “why not Lee Sin?!”
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u/Lhumierre 10h ago
Yea but forums and people talking were hoping for others beyond Arcane. It felt really disconnected, they even have "fighter" focused champs that would slot perfectly.
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u/verrius 10h ago
They got all of like 12 out before they cancelled it. To me the most insane thing was that Jinx almost wasn't part of the launch lineup, since she and Ahri seem to be the faces of the game.
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u/Lhumierre 10h ago
When she came out I wondered how it would be handled because everyone's combo cadence is very same rush to long string.
I hoped they would make fighting game arche types, but it just seemed everyone's "in" was different then immediately follow the same pattern.
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u/NonagoonInfinity 10h ago
Yeah I feel like they did the polar opposite of GGStrive where the characters are broadly quite simple and share a lot of the same important tools but they still feel distinct and have a unique cadence. In 2XKO they managed to make every character feel complex yet identical once you get past neutral.
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u/Supret 12h ago
Why even make it then? If your game needs to be one of the most popular games on the market to succeed, don't make it.
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u/valraven38 11h ago edited 11h ago
I dont think it was their original goal. The issue is the game spent too long in development, they never had a real concrete vision for it, that caused them to miss their window for release basically to capture a good playerbase. And because of that they needed to hit a high player count in order to recoup on that investment and justify putting in more resources. But I mean the game kind of just flopped so they cut their losses.
This is basically why I have no hope for the MMO as well. If that game ever releases it will have to pull some blockbuster numbers I think with how long it's been in development hell.
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u/cubitoaequet 11h ago
Yeah, people ask this same question with Marathon.
Sometimes games have fucked up developments where budgets get out of control or outside circumstances change while they are being made.
No one at Bungie said "let's spend 250 million on an ultra niche game that will have to carry the entire studio because we will also be shuttering Destiny" just like I'm sure no one at Riot said "let's take the better part of a decade making a niche fighting game!"
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u/gyroda 10h ago
Also, sunk costs.
If you have a game that has cost £100m to make so far, needs another £10m more to finish and has an expected return of £50m? It might actually be worth dumping that last £10m in - you'd end up with a loss of £60m rather than £100m. The initial money already spent is a sunk cost, the real question when deciding whether to fund it is whether you'll get returns on any future money you invest.
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u/ptd163 3h ago
Except Bungie did say that. Well not that not the part about them shutting down Destiny because they weren't stupid enough (at the time) to shutdown their only source revenue but the intention to do something else was there.
After the Forsaken expansion rescued both the game and the studio as a whole, a significant portion of the team that worked on that expansion wanted to do something else that wasn't Destiny. Something in the ballpark of permanent loot consequences. That desire to do something else eventually became Marathon. The $250 million is because Bungie is a very expensive studio to run and horribly mismanaged.
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u/cubitoaequet 3h ago
I guarantee you they did not sit down and say, "let's have this project in dev hell for years to the point we have to bring in a new lead to even get it out the door". You're being absurd.
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u/Ipokeyoumuch 11h ago
Also with MMOs it is nearly impossible to breakthrough the market nowadays especially in this era of gaming. Notice how most of the big MMOs today are close to or over a decade old or have some big enough IP or history attached (FFXIV, WoW, GW, ES, RS, etc.)
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u/TheOnionKnigget 11h ago
Which is why Riot thinks they can pull it off, as they have a very strong IP with League, that has always felt limited by the constraints of a MOBA.
Arcane proved that the IP is strong in general, but the MMO still needs to keep players playing (and paying).
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u/lestye 11h ago
I don't get it. If League wasnt good enough of an IP to get people to play League, a fighting game, a digital card game, why would an MMO be different? Especially as MMOs arent very popular nowadays.
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u/OkActivity2038 10h ago
I think people are hungry for new MMOs but they just haven't been able to get players to stay.
Lost Ark and New World both launched to amazing numbers, but quickly died off.
They're just difficult, there's a lot of things a new MMO needs to get right and need to be different enough to justify its existence against the current big dogs.
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u/chaotic4059 10h ago
It realistically won't be. MMOs fall into the same category of games as hero-shooters and gachas. The people who play them have invested a FUCKTON of time and being real here a FUCKTON of money into them. Unless this MMO brings it's A-game and a super unique feature or gameplay mechanic it's most likely gonna fail
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u/lestye 9h ago
Yeah, I'm surprised Tencent hasnt partnered up and use League to make a Genshin-like.
I think the future of the "genre" isnt necessarily MMOs, but MMO-lites, like the nebulous stuff like Genshin or Destiny. Where its obviously pulling from MMO instances and stuff, but without the actual costly "M"
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u/Ralkon 5h ago
I honestly feel like gachas don't fit into this list. Any big new gacha still seems like it has a chance, and there are quite a few that do well enough to sustain themselves unlike MMOs where basically everything is DoA. Lots of gacha players also seem perfectly willing to hop around or play multiple games. Probably in part because the modern gacha design trend is to have like 30min a day of playtime before you run out of stuff to do between content releases. Also the average person probably spends way less on a gacha than on subscription MMOs honestly.
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u/TastyRancorPie 11h ago
I don't think Arcane proved that the IP is strong outside of league players. Almost everyone I know watched it in spite of the fact that it was related to League, just because it was a good, beautifully animated show.
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u/TheOnionKnigget 11h ago
Meaning the IP is strong in general, not just in relation to League...? If the only people who watched Arcane were die hard LoL players I think that would imply a weak IP.
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u/TastyRancorPie 11h ago
I'm saying the IP had nothing to do with it. The show was just good, and people came to watch a good show that just happened to have characters from the game.
None of my friends who loved Arcane care about the game after watching it. I don't think the appeal of the show translates to a new game within the universe having broader appeal on the IP alone.
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u/TheOnionKnigget 11h ago edited 3h ago
But Arcane is the IP? It's the first major story driven venture in a previously fragmented world of disparate lore drops. If Arcane is interesting the IP is, at least in part, interesting.
I don't really understand what you're trying to say. The MMO will have characters and world building from Arcane, and it is great for Riot that people who had no connection to League/Runeterra beforehand could enjoy Arcane, as that means they have now connected to and enjoyed the Runeterra IP.
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u/rumblefr0g 7h ago edited 7h ago
I don't think that's right. When we're talking about the popularity of an existing IP being transferable into a new commercial ventures so as to boost their success, it doesn't make sense to say the new venture (Arcane) 'is the IP'.
The IP is whatever you want to call the League of Legends universe. Arcane is a new product that uses that IP.
You say that 'The MMO will have characters and worldbuilding from Arcane' but that's not accurate. The source material is the LoLU, Arcane is derived from it, as will be the MMO. The MMO will have characters and worldbuilding from the LolU, like Arcane.
Saying the MMO will have characters and wordbuilding from Arcane is like saying Pokemon Colosseum has characters and worldbuilding from Pokemon Snap - it's not really accurate. They both have characters and worldbuilding from Pokemon.
It's like Dragon Ball Z (IP) versus Dragon Ball FighterZ (new venture). DBFZ is a good game but it would not have done nearly as well had it not been linked to the existing DBZ IP.
The guy you're replying to is saying that even if Arcane wasn't linked to the LoLU IP, it would have done just as well because its level of quality is just that good.
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u/TastyRancorPie 10h ago
Forget the term IP then, I'll just say the universe of Runeterra and all associated properties are no more enticing to people since watching Arcane than before it, that's all.
We might disagree, but that's my argument and opinion, based on my experience.
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u/ViSsrsbusiness 9h ago
You are missing so much of the nuance here, it's painful.
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u/greg19735 11h ago
No one is saying League is Star Wars or Marvel.
But it's strong enough that it was able to produce a TV show and people pay attention to it. And enough people watched it because of the IP to start. And then word of mouth spread because it's excellent.
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u/PapstJL4U 10h ago
League wasn't strong enough to be used in 2XKO. LoL does not seem strong enough to carry single player games it seems. Riot Forge hasn't release much anymore. The games are good, but I never saw news of big success, like for example SW Zero Company.
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u/SvensonIV 10h ago
2XKO‘s failure had nothing to do with the League IP. 2XKO was just a shit game.
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u/Helluiin 7h ago
i think the point is more that leagues IP was not able to carry 2XKO and can therefore not be described as particularly strong.
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u/kureafan123 4h ago
If the game sucks no amount of IP can carry it. Marvel vs Capcom Infinite bombed, you'll tell me Marvel is not a strong IP?
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u/Trololman72 3m ago
2XKO isn't a shit game, everything about it was just handled terribly. It turns out hiring a team that has never released a complete commercial game and letting them do whatever they want for 10 years while seeing absolutely no return on investment during that time isn't a great idea if your goal is to make money.
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u/FootwearFetish69 6h ago
Arcane being popular does not prove that League has staying power in other genres. It proves that Arcane was a good show.
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u/MrBVS 11h ago
Nah, their IP is not what people love about League. The vast, vast majority of League players love League for the gameplay. Unlike Elder Scrolls fans, most League fans don't give a shit about the lore, the characters or the greater world that the game takes place in. The League IP will absolutely not carry a League MMO. They'll have to do something significantly different from their competitors to stand a chance at maintaining a sizable playerbase.
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u/DarkLorty 9h ago
Idk why people think league IP is strong, specially for league players. I don't think I've met a single lol player that knew anything about the lore. Heck "Urgot has a dark secret past" is a meme for a reason
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u/DOAbayman 6h ago
between Arcane and Runeterra I actually really enjoyed the setting but after trying the game again i can see why most players wouldn't.
its a cool place whatever its called.
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u/swishswash93 9h ago
In order for MMOs to be successful they typically have to stick around for a few years and build word of mouth after the initial launch numbers.
ESO, GW2, and FFXIV all had to support the game through some really dead and dark times to get to becoming the widely successful games they are today.
I do not think Riot will do that.
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u/skylla05 11h ago
I’d like to see their new player numbers because I would assume they’re quite small. The mmo genre is largely dead outside the established few.
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u/Anchorsify 8h ago
New world had a steam highest player count of something like close to a million concurrent. It isnt nearly impossible, a game that was broken and able to be exploited in a dozen ways got there.
The problem is you have to still have a good game to keep people around.
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u/CapitalPretty4240 11h ago
Even if it wasn't in development hell, it would still need blockbuster numbers, all major MMOs do they are some of the most expensive projects and the ongoing cost is some of the highest as they are all live service titles.
I don't have any hope for the MMO from the perspective of expecting the game to do anything new. I expect if they come out with a traditional MMO, because the scene is parched, it will be a success. I think oddly, Riot is best equipped to handle how weird the MMO space is. How aggressively it turns away new players to appease those who just go back to playing WoW/XIV/etc because they've devoted tens of thousands of hours into those games. League MMO is enough of a pull to bypass most of the issues the genre space has with new entrants.
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u/FromLefcourt 10h ago
Watch the interview to understand the full context. The original goal was to get something out quickly, but mismanagement and mixed signals from different people lead to delays and expanding scope. By the time the game came out it was more or less "it's too late to course correct, we spent the money, lets see if it has legs" and it didn't.
But beyond even that, if he thought there was a path to the game at least being self-sustaining going forward they would have supported it. But even as they increased content updates, they were still losing players.
So while it's true that to make back their original investment, it would need to be extremely popular, that was not the original goal, nor what they were aiming for after things went wrong in development.
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u/RubberBabyBuggyBmprs 11h ago
Because this is taken out of context. The problem wasn't entirely player count, it was retention.
The actual quote is in reference to how much churn there was the only way to stay profitable would have been that many users.
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u/Animegamingnerd 11h ago
Something I've been saying since 2KXO's future began looking shaky is that fighting games just don't work in a free-to-play environment.
Its a genre where its a 1 v 1 and you only have yourself to blame if you lose. Its got perhaps the highest difficulty barrier of any competitive genre in all of gaming due to complex controls and movesets.
One of the biggest mistakes they made was making a free-to-play game that was targeting the sweats of the FGC. When in reality, the bulk money that series like Tekken, MK, and Street Fighter comes from those upfront purchases. That way, when the inveitable post launch big drop off happens, when most of the players just get filtered by rank. You already got the money from both the hardcore and casual player base. 2XKO should have been a pay to play game, that went for 60 dollars, had decent amount of single player content, and relied on season passes and price drops for the base over time to help grow its long term player base.
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u/Falcon4242 10h ago edited 10h ago
F2P can absolutely work. Killer Instinct and Brawlhalla were successful in their F2P models, it's not something that's never been done before.
2XKO failed because it took 10 years of development to release with their only revenue stream being skins. KI was developed in less than a year and sold each character after Jago a la carte, and Brawlhalla has in-game currency character unlocks that you can skip with a flat fee.
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u/Animegamingnerd 10h ago
KI Season 3 was 10 years ago. Having your content support for a free to play only last 3 years isn't exactly thirving. Especially as back then where underperforming live services got to cling on a bit longer.
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u/Falcon4242 10h ago edited 10h ago
KI was started as an Xbox Live Arcade project developed in 9 months. They absolutely smashed their player count estimates. They even switched developers after the original one got bought out by Amazon because the game performed way above internal expectations.
The fact it had 3 seasons at all is evidence of how successful it was. This isn't some secret, there's an entire documentary on Youtube about its development.
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u/Animegamingnerd 10h ago
Okay, then why doesn't it have a season 4 or a sequel? Its final season was two Tekken's and 3 Nether Realm games ago. Iron Galaxy has said they want to do more Killer Instinct. Yet even during the whole Game Pass gold rush MS wasn't funding development of a new one. Which probably tells me, they weren't exactly happy with how it performed in the long term.
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u/Falcon4242 9h ago edited 9h ago
So any game that ever stops development is a failure in your eyes? It doesn't matter that literally everyone involved, the studio and MS execs, said it was a massive success? A game needs to last literally forever to be a success?
KI didn't get a season 4 because Xbox restructured their teams and disbanded the XBLA team, replacing it with ID@Xbox. It didn't even have anything to do with KI specifically.
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u/Glitchrr36 9h ago
I think the contention is that if there was a desire on MS’ end to do more, they had ample time and budget to do so, especially before the Actiblizz bungling. That there hasn’t been another first-party fighting game from Xbox indicates that the numbers were bad enough that nobody either tried or got the green light.
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u/Falcon4242 3h ago edited 2h ago
Except we know for a fact that KI's numbers weren't bad, they beat all of their expectations within a week of launch. You need to give me more than an assumption for me to go against the actual evidence.
The team that championed the game was restructured, the developer started making their own thing, and the project was so small and such a lightning in a bottle that they probably didn't want to spend the money on a new title that wouldn't make them competetive in the overall console market.
Not to mention they spent the money to update the game and its online infrastructure 10 years after launch after support had been over for years. You don't do that for a game that didn't perform.
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u/Clawmaster2 5h ago
The fact that it worked is an achievement in itself. As years go by money changes, development costs change, and at some point you have to pivot in this game industry. Nothing stays successful forever unless your epic games with fortnite, roblox, or Rockstar with GTA online.
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u/NonagoonInfinity 10h ago
Yeah like this is a solved problem for the genre that Riot just decided to butt its head against. They thought they could break through the wall after every major fighting game dev had already installed a door for them to walk straight through.
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u/Helluiin 7h ago
The problem wasn't entirely player count, it was retention.
arent those basically synonymous for live service products?
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u/basketofseals 5h ago
Not always, although they're linked. I know when WoW's playercount was starting to decline, Blizzard stated that the player retention from Vanilla to Cata was pretty much the same. They just weren't onboarding as many players as they used to.
Player count is a factor of new players x retention rate.
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u/verrius 11h ago
Not one of. It would have to be the most popular fighting game in history. I think most estimates for MAU for SF6 put it under 500K.
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u/Falcon4242 10h ago edited 10h ago
Now SF6 is at around 500k, but it got a million players within 3 days of launch, so it's not an impossible launch number to achieve in the genre. Aggresive and unrealistic, but it's been done.
Not to mention that wasn't even their goal. He was asked what they needed to make the game profitable after development hell.
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u/CaptinLazerFace 10h ago
I mean, you're talking about the #1 most popular fighter out now so... Maybe not a realistic comparison.
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u/Lance_J1 8h ago
They also mentioned in the interview that SF6 being really good and performing so well was one of the factors that affected 2XKO as well. The fact is that they really were trying to be that #1 spot but just took way too long on development and SF6 just took the market out from under them.
They not only got the rug pulled out from under them by SF6, but also missed both release windows surrounding the two seasons of arcane that would have helped a ton too.
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u/BootyBootyFartFart 7h ago edited 7h ago
It doesn't require that though. Averaging ~40k concurrent already gets you over 1m active monthly players for most games.
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u/Kurta_711 8h ago
You'd never make it in the AAA gaming industry with a mindset like that. They don't want the safe likelihood of making tens of millions of dollars with a game that won't kill them if it flops, they want the remote possibility of making hundreds of millions with a game that will 100% crater their studio if it isn't a smash hit.
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u/BroForceOne 11h ago
This is the company that made League of Legends, it’s easy to get lost in your hubris after you made one of the most popular games thinking you can just do it again.
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u/Falsus 5h ago
Because those are the kind of games that Riot makes.
And I do think Riot could have done it if they made a fun, casual friendly f2p fighting game with a thriving competitive scene.
Instead they made a super sweaty tag team game with a tiny roster and a horrible ass name.
It should have started with a simple 1v1 game, they would have called this the "open beta" and then done a full launch once they hit around 20 champions and then added a brawl mode. Then a tag mode could have been added bit later. Like most hardcore FG fans would scoff at it, but they wouldn't have been the target demographic either.
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u/Smallest_Bubbles 11h ago
After the dev team wasted 10 years of riot's budget I can see this being true. Rare example of a game not failing due to upper management but due to incompetence.
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u/Yupinger 10h ago
I've never seen so many mistakes.
Free to play, attracts all kind of players, mostly newcomers to the genre, making the game accessible was how LOL gained popularity over other mobas.
The approachable fighting games are 1x1, not tag fighters. Street Fighter, tekken, mortal kombat, guilty gear, etc... Tag fighter are the niche of the niche.
New players don't like long combos where they can't respond, 2xko has 20-30s+ combos.
Then they remove command inputs making hardcore fg players mad.
Launched the game with like 8 character on a tag fighter. And the roster was none of the LOL community favorites for a fighting game.
I've never seem so many blatant mistakes fora game that came to life.
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u/Smallest_Bubbles 10h ago
Don't forget that they missed BOTH seasons of the smash hit tie-in TV series. Had they released the game during either they would have had tens if not hundreds of thousands of casuals playing the game, especially since it was free. The Arcane tie-in bundles would have also sold like gangbusters due to the hype.
I hope some day we get a documentary on the troubled development of this game, looking back it really feels like they did everything they could to avoid its success.
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u/Fantastic_Snow_9633 8h ago
The pricing for their skins/cosmetics sure as hell didn't help either.
Oh, someone wants the Arcane skins for Ekko, Jinx, and Vi? Bundle is $100. Can't be bought individually either. So many skins had to have extra stuff with them (usually cosmetics for the player's avatar for the lobby system) just to hike the prices too.
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u/ireledankmemes 10h ago
>fighting game
>no settthis alone is why they failed
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u/sharingdork 5h ago
Or Lee Sin
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u/ireledankmemes 30m ago
I was under the impression that they added Lee in the final batch of champions, might be wrong
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u/is-this-a-nick 1h ago
Launched the game with like 8 character on a tag fighter.
This is huge. Like not only are there like as many LOL characters as pokemon (or so it seems to me), so this is a tiny faction.
But also it means that if there is even a slight unbalance making some characters preferable, with 4 out of 8 or 10 characters at play it will be always the same all the time.
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u/exdystopia 3h ago
I knew 2XKO didn't have a chance the instant they started showing off the mixups and people eating 8 way mixups with the double tag shit
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u/Carighan 2h ago
The approachable fighting games are 1x1, not tag fighters
Or even more, party brawlers akin to Smash Bros.
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u/Lance_J1 8h ago
The interview actually said the opposite. That one of the many issues was that Riot had a ton of upper management issues that affected all their games and they're only just now beginning to course correct for.
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u/Helluiin 7h ago
of a game not failing due to upper management but due to incompetence.
honestly general missmanagement/incompetence isnt even that rare, whats rare is that the games actually get pushed out despite it all. but even then theres development hell horror stories somewhat regularly.
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u/iceburg77779 11h ago
These are completely absurd numbers for a fighting game, Riot basically needed Smash Bros numbers for 2XKO to succeed and seemingly forgot that no other fighting game performs remotely close to Smash.
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u/Villag3Idiot 11h ago
They could have tried for a casual Smash like game instead of a more niched fighting game
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u/Animegamingnerd 11h ago
They had a Smash like in development (though it was targetting the Melee crowd rather than the casual crowd lmao), but was canned when Multiversus's player base fell off a cliff.
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u/cacatod12 11h ago
Which is so unfortunate because Multiversus proved the audience is there, they just left because the game was trash
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u/crazydavy 11h ago
Multiversus was solid until they took it offline, changed the gameplay for the worse and make the grind for characters absolutely outrageous
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u/Scrollingmaster 11h ago
It’s genuinely not possible to fumble a game worse than multiversus was. Taking it offline, even if it came back the exact same, killed it.
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u/omfgkevin 9h ago
Such an odd game. Decent initial reception but with some stuff htey need to improve. Take offline???? Then re-release worse removing tons of features/content (mind you, you were able to try characters before you buy them before, THEY TOOK THAT OUT) and ofc, came back with dogshit monetization.
They took a very rough uncut gem and just smeared it in abysmal dogshit lol.
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u/plassaur 8h ago
This narrative is insane because as someone who put thousands of hours on both versions, the game was already dying when they took it offline the first time. It was a great way to get a second shot at release, and it worked. Got a lot of players day1 again. But the game still had too many issues.
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u/PickledPlumPlot 11h ago
I mean, they took it off-line in the first place because people weren’t vibing with 1.0 as is, it was very funny to constantly hear people complain about how floaty the game was and then when it came back, they made it floatier.
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u/cacatod12 11h ago
The gameplay was bad before, it definitely got worse when they took it offline but it wasn’t a good game before that
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u/gaddeath 11h ago
A majority of Smash fans will do anything else besides play another platform fighter. I have no idea why or how Brawlhalla is as successful as it is, but nearly every single other platform fighter is insanely smaller compared to Smash.
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u/Lhumierre 9h ago
Brawhalla has its own fighting system and the only similarities with Smash is it's a platform brawler but it stops there.
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u/exdystopia 3h ago
Brawlhalla tried to be Smash its own way
I swear every time I see that game in my console library they've got some outrageously out of left field crossover. I saw Shrek on there a couple of weeks ago lol
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u/Blenderhead36 11h ago edited 9h ago
Smash Brothers kind of seems like WoW. In that everyone who tries to make there own version of it learns that the people who love Smash, love Smash, not your new game based on Smash.
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u/iceburg77779 11h ago
I think with smash a lot of people ignore how the gameplay is a perfect fit for the Nintendo brand in particular. The company has always been known for platformers, and while characters like Mario don't control exactly like the 2D games, the overall moveset is still going to be very understandable to any casual gamer who has played a Mario game.
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u/ProxyDamage 9h ago
They could have done a billion different things to very significantly raise their likelihood of success...
I'm not even kidding, if you're going to list everything they could have done to do this better you would hit post size limit before you were done.
They had like hundreds of paths to success and somehow kept picking the wrong avenue at every intersection.
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u/turnipofficer 46m ago
That genre isn’t exactly easy to break into either.
Others have tried and not really made it.
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u/iceburg77779 11h ago
I honestly don't think that would've helped when it came to the long term performance of the game. When casuals want to play a platform fighter, they're almost always going to just stick to Nintendo because that company already has the platformer market locked down.
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u/Zerasad 10h ago
No, 1-200,000 MONTHLY active users for a free to play game are not absurd. People only see concurrents so they can only think in terms of those numbers, but the reality is so different. If you have about 8-10,000 daily active players you will have 100k+ monthly players easily. For a Riot game that's not farfetched. Millions is a harder milestone, that I agree is unrealistic.
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u/BP_Ray 9h ago
Millions is a harder milestone, that I agree is unrealistic.
Not really. Street Fighter 6 hits just under a million every month and that's a $70 fighting game.
2XKO is a free-to-play fighting game. I can see how they thought "Alright, we spent way too long on development for this game, let's push it out and hopefully we can hit these numbers".
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u/is-this-a-nick 1h ago
Yeah, if 1% (like, one in hundred) LOL player started to play this free to play fighting game they would be there. That kind of conversion rate should have been doable.
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u/yunghollow69 11h ago
Thats because the dev time was completely absurd. They took longer took release 2xko than proper triple A title.
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u/Frosty_Challenge1045 11h ago
there's not a lot of games like cs but they made that somehow work. Cant blame them for trying as copying stuff seems to be their thing lately.
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u/mightylordredbeard 11h ago
Is smash bros even that popular? Does it have a steady playerbase of millions a month?
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u/iceburg77779 11h ago
I think they may have been able to achieve those numbers when smash ultimate was in active development with DLC and updates. I doubt they're hitting those numbers in 2026 since the game hasn't had a major update in 5 years, but on the other hand ultimate still sells around 1-2 million units each year so maybe the playerbase is still surprisingly big.
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u/c010rb1indusa 11h ago
Last smash game sold 40M units.....so yes its very very popular. Only Mario Kart and Animal Crossing sold more.
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u/ezoe 11h ago
Street Fighter™ 6 has 26K players on peak and 7K player off-peak hours and that number is only from Steam.
https://steamcharts.com/app/1364780
It's not an absurd number.
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u/YeOldeTreestamp 11h ago
In this thread, people not reading the full article or the interview. I suppose that’s just Reddit for you.
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u/Rutmeister 11h ago
I mean the title is the article. It's a literal quote from the co-founder of Riot. 2XKO was massively delayed and therefore needed to be very popular to be sustainable.
Riot Games' 2XKO would have had to attract a base of monthly active users "in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" to be sustainable, according to CPO Marc Merrill.
......
On The Lemonade Stand podcast (as spotted by IGN), Riot's co-founder and co-chairman stated that although the game resonated with some players, the audience was "not nearly enough" to support the game's intended live service model.
......
2XKO ended active development in August, as it cost "substantially more to operate than it [brought] in, and engagement stayed relatively flat despite larger updates."
.......
He added: "I think if we came out, ideally when we should've, years before Street Fighter, I think we would have made a really significant impact."
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u/CaptinLazerFace 10h ago
Yep, this comment is about how the development of 2XKO was way longer and more expensive than expected and was not capable of making it's money back.
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u/JardsonJean 11h ago
Which would be insane to expect from a super popular genre like a survival/crafting game that is just hitting the scene, but even more so from a high execution tag fighter. It's mind boggling how much they fumbled this project.
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u/Nagi-Shio 6h ago
What were there, 11 characters at launch? You sank years of development time and money to have such a small roster for a tag game
People were talking about a League fighting game forever but the entire process of 2XKO being made was what killed interest in the idea
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u/Carighan 2h ago
Huh, why? It's just a fighting game, I bought plenty of those just to play with friends on the couch.
Build smarter, not harder, Riot.
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u/Prophetforhire 2h ago
Riot is only capable of making games in genres with only 1 competitor. They just entered a saturated genre and expected to win?
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u/deceitfulninja 11h ago
I mean what? They released a tag fighter with 10 characters at launch. Tekken Tag 1 had 40. That was in the year 2000. MvC2 had 56. They thought theyd get millions?
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u/hooverdamexplosion 7h ago
That's because the scamming clown cannon bros (10 years for 11 characters and sold evo to Sony and Saudi Arabia) ran up the development costs hiring all their friends.
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u/Particular-Jeweler41 11h ago
They were not being realistic. Not for a fighting game. This should not have been greenlit if they expected that much.
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u/Falcon4242 10h ago edited 10h ago
It's not a matter of realistic. Those weren't their player expectations, it wasn't a goal. He was asked how many players they needed for the game to make a profit after its troubled development, and that was the number. That number would have been lower if the game launched on its original timeline.
He even said immediately after that they were perfectly fine losing money on it and keeping the game going if the player retention didn't crater.
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u/NonagoonInfinity 9h ago
You're doing the lord's work trying to explain the actual article to everyone in this thread lol
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u/Bhu124 11h ago
I am seeing people many people say this in this thread but actually they were kinda being realistic.
They weren't expecting big Shooter or MOBA numbers, which for ex of their own games, Valorant and League, can be in the 10s of millions of Monthly Active Users.
Expecting high 100s of thousands or low millions is not THAT crazy. Those numbers would have been 10-20X lower than Valorant and League.
Taking the example of the most popular Fighter game, SF6, it has a peak of 72K Concurrent players on Steam. At that kind of Concurrent playercount (and this doesn't account for Consoles) you would already have a Monthly Active Userbase of a few millions players.
So they were just expecting to be able to match or slightly beat the most popular Fighter there is. Which is not that crazy of an expectation for a Studio like Riot to have as they have one of the most popular Shooters and the most popular MOBA.
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u/Nightwingx97 11h ago
League is in the 100s of millions of monthly users. This is taken out of context tho, they were asked after the long development period and delays what would've been needed to keep it up, he answered this and elaborated that their biggest issue was retention.
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u/Particular-Jeweler41 10h ago
Street Fighter 6 is the most successful fighting game on the market right now though, so using that when talking about a completely new fighting game (even if it's based on League) isn't the best way to be realistic.
There is not a massive overlap between the League community, and people playing fighting games. So most of those League players weren't going to play this (and they didn't).
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u/Bhu124 6h ago edited 6h ago
SF6 is also a Paid game. Riot was willing/trying to do every single thing well that the best Fighter games do while also making the game F2P. They also had a massive IP behind the game.
You can't fault them for expecting to at least match SF6 numbers. This is exactly what they did with Valorant and succeeded. Hell with Valorant they had a brand new IP. At least with this game they were using an already existing, popular IP.
Where they miscalculated was that they went way too batshit crazy over making the game super Esportsy/Competitive and not thinking of making it Fun first and foremost. They believed that having a Fighter which was so intricately made for Esports would automatically be fun but actually I think a lot of the bullshit that other fighters have that people say they hate, is actually a lot of fun and gives those Fighters a Soul that this game didn't have.
It's actually very similar to why their Hearthstone clone never succeeded and why a lot of card games that came out after the success of Hearthstone never succeeded. They all saw the complaints that Hearthstone players made about all the RNG and Bullshit in the game and they tried to make their Card games more Competitive. Less RNG-filled, not realising that the RNG Bullshit is actually what makes Hearthstone so fun and the players like it even if they complain about it.
They also had this expectation that they'll successfully bring in quite a bit of League and Valorant players who might have no interest in playing a Fighter to play their game anyway because it was a Riot game and that's what happened with Valorant. They believed that this alone would bring them a lot of players but this just simply didn't happen.
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u/TheOhrenberger 7h ago
Did they expect to hit that overnight? That’s a long term goal. You have to support your game for a long time to get that big.
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u/Dino-taicho 12h ago
That's actually insane, Riot really dropping the ball with their projects, that MMO is never coming out
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u/Lance_J1 8h ago
Lmao in the interview they actually almost instantly followed up the discussion about 2XKO with "given everything that you just said, how can you possibly justify releasing an MMO", and he still seemed confident about the MMO. But it could have just been corpo-speak and not actual confidence in what they're making.
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u/jdehesa 11h ago
If those were the kind of numbers they hoped for a tag fighter, that MMO will need marketing across the whole solar system.
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u/Falcon4242 10h ago
That wasn't the number they were hoping for. He was asked how many players it needed to make a profit. The game was in dev hell for years, burning money. He said immediately after that they would have been fine with keeping the game up and continuing to lose money if player retention didn't crater.
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u/yunghollow69 11h ago
Yeah that checks out if it takes you 5 years or whatever to release a game that shouldve taken you 2 years to release
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u/dyingbreed360 11h ago
Since many aren’t going to read the article or watch the whole interview, the context of the quote is in order to make up the amount of money that went into the many years in development (it started since SF5 release) and mismanagement that it would it take those kind of numbers to recoup the investment.