[Gaming] My reflection on the "2xko case"
Well, I said I had plans to come back here to talk a little bit about the 2XKO stuff that happened like a month or something ago now. To be honest, this wasn't something that I was hoping for with the game. As someone who enjoys fighting games, the more, the merrier. To be honest, the only fighting game that I've been playing recently is SF, but it's not like I don't try other games.
I tested 2XKO during a beta, or alpha, I don't know, but one thing that I remember feeling was that the game wasn't that ready or even that tag-team games aren't for me. The last tag team I played was Marvel vs Capcom during the PS2 era, and I remember having a blast when I was a kid playing with Spider-Man and Ryu on the same team. Yeah, those days were easier for sure.
But after that, and a long time away from fighting games, I never had a chance to have that kind of "click" playing a tag-team game like that. This was exactly what I thought until I played 2XKO. During the beta, I remember keeping on playing for more than 5 hours in the same session of that game, and a few times defending my title in the lobby I was in for having the best win streak. I thought to myself, "yeah, these guys have a nice game on their hands". Even though I was never a huge League of Legends player, I always knew that the characters of the game were super captivating and it was a matter of time to have iconic characters there.
After a few days playing the alpha (or beta, idk), once again came that thought: "hey, I'm not sure if tag team is for me. This ever-evolving meta where I'm supposed to learn more than 1 character isn't my thing." To be honest, I describe myself as a huge casual, and just the option of playing casual matches or ranked wasn't enough for me.
When I heard about 2XKO a long time ago, I hadn't had that click again with fighting games yet. Not sure if I already brought that up here, but I hadn't been playing fighting games for more than 10 years, and I definitely fell in love once again with the genre after playing a LOT of GBVSR. To be fair, when SF6 first came out, I bought it on day one, but after a few matches, the game felt strange to me and I dropped it, coming back to it only 2 years later, after GBVSR. The point here that both games have in common, besides a ranked ladder and casual matches, is some casual content, like a story mode for example. That was something that 2XKO never managed to create, even though their characters have a LOT of backstory and lore to depict, which sounds like a real fumble to me. I don't need to talk about how after 2 years SF6 found my heart and I truly think that it is the best fighting game ever made. Of course it has its errors and stuff that annoys me, but as a casual player, it has a plethora of stuff to do every time I open the game.
That's pretty much the thing that I'm not sure Riot Games will ever understand. League is mainly focused on its competitive part, the PvP stuff. But besides that, it has a ton of stuff like merchandising, lore videos, side games (like the card one or even offline games) that came out and were even removed lol, music stuff where characters from its world sing and play instruments, a fucking Netflix series, and it goes on. Besides the PvP part and the ranked ladder, most of the stuff I mentioned is mostly being consumed by a LOT of casual players that probably will NEVER reach a high ELO or even become pro players, streamers, follow teams at Worlds or anything like that. And that's pretty much ok, since everyone has something to consume. That's where 2XKO failed, in my point of view.
In a genre where the numbers aren't the greatest compared to other competitive games or even esports broadcasts, to keep a game alive, you mostly need content. Surely the team that worked on that game was capable enough for that, but here comes the strange part where the game was shut down less than one year on the market and labelled as a failure by the developer. Even though they "allegedly did market research" about the best way to execute this game and decided to go for the hardest mode possible (creating a tag team), even if they had a lot of spotlight, creators that were betting on the game and leaving other anime fighters, SF6 or Tekken to play it, and even if they had some community around them that they managed to captivate, it wasn't enough. Their expectations were "higher than the reality, and keeping this game alive was costing more than what the game was making." To be honest, from a billion-dollar company like them, it just sounds like bullshit to me. This mentality is bad for the industry, the players, the people who worked hard on the project for years, and for the genre itself. Because every new entry, if it isn't reaching SF6 numbers, is a failure now? Do they know that comparing a game that has been on the market since 1987 with a game less than a year old that uses a tag-team scheme (which is, let's put it like that, a "sub-genre" of fighting games that most people who play fighting games don't play), with almost no casual content besides PvP, and a roster that could be much more based on a 10+ year MOBA game that has a TON of content—is this really fair? I could have listed more stuff, but I got tired.
To wrap up, even though I'm not playing 2XKO, as a fighting game enjoyer, seeing this kind of stuff makes me think about the future of the genre, since it's getting harder to prosper in the industry, and the numbers that something needs to reach have to be astronomical, otherwise it's an utter failure. This is madness.