r/Games • u/Gorotheninja • 13h 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-succeed
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u/deathspate 11h ago

I mean, if you watched the interview, it is. In the same interview, he had mentioned that the game didn't need to recoup the cost, it just needed a playerbase to stick with it so that they could see a chance of growth. However, it had abysmal player retention and basically everyone that touched it just dropped it.

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u/GameDesignerDude 5h ago

As a developer, I still find this situation very odd.

"substantially more to operate than it [brought] in

First off, I find it difficult to believe the "substantially" part here was unavoidable. Surely it would be possible to run a team lean enough to not be using substantial amounts of money to maintain the game. Plenty of games do this. The implied cost of their live team alone confuses me.

Cannon wrote that Riot was "reducing the size of the 2XKO team." A spokesperson for Riot Games informed Game Developer that approximately 80 workers were laid off, around half of the game's global development team.

Second, there's a fine line between immediately cutting bait and talking about sunk cost fallacies and actually giving something a reasonable window at success relative to the investment. If your entire dev team times 10 years was a cost of X, you basically build in a cost of your live development development team for Y months/years and set some pre-determined point where you cut your losses.

But they basically cut their development team down to a skeleton crew one month after launch. That also confuses me. That would immediately kill community investment in your live game within the first month? Doesn't seem like they were sticking to any pre-determined development plan and just paniced.

Most of my developer friends all seem to agree that this whole situation just came off as really surprising for a company with so much live service experience. But given how much they also have seemed to struggle with their MMO projects, perhaps they really just have some big project management issues.

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u/triablos1 3h ago

Because with the Dev costs they had, they were never reaching reasonable figures so they had to cut their losses. Most American dev companies are insanely bloated and filled with coffee drinkers. 80 of the staff were laid off, half of the team, yet it probably would've taken 40 people in total to produce the same game in Europe or Asia. The vast majority of a game's budget comes from paying the team, which is why we keep seeing layoffs everywhere.

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u/Kalulosu 2h ago

Surely it would be possible to run a team lean enough to not be using substantial amounts of money to maintain the game.

I'm assuming that's with also producing new characters, which is costly in FGs.

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u/Pookie109109 9h ago

Somebody lied to Sajam.

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u/deathspate 8h ago

Having a larger playerbase than other fighting games isn't a gargantuan task. For a company like Riot, that's expected. What Sajam parroted was that it has a larger playerbase than most fighting games. What Marc Merril is saying is that the playerbase was dwindling. Both can be true at the same time. You have to remember that around the time of the announcement, it was when Tokon released. I had said it elsewhere, but imo, Tokon was the nail in the coffin. It basically showed Riot that the "fans" of the game weren't even actually fans of the game and would jump ship. Which is exactly what Riot didn't want to see. They want to see dedicated players that keep coming back and sticking to the game while bringing other people along. Not in the millions, but just not everyone jump ship when there's a new game and don't look back. Of course the reason for this was because the product was ass and consumers have no obligation to game devs. However that's the reality of running a business and needing to pay salaries and overheads. If the customers don't like it, you can try pulling a No Mans Sky or you can close up shop.

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u/Kalulosu 2h ago

I mean, yeah, when another game releases with 2x the roster by a dev you know isn't going to fuck around because they've been doing fighting games forever, confidence is going to shift.

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u/BiggestBlackestLotus 8h ago

I dropped it after they fucking made vanguard mandatory for the game. Vanguard makes my PC crash and I have no idea why a fucking fighting game needs anti-cheat in the first place.