The fighting game community has been struck by the sudden news of 2XKO staff getting laid off. This is incredibly sad news for anyone involved in the development team, because the game has not even completed a full year of release on multiple systems.
While things were looking fine for the game that just released, we guess Riot Games had some other expectations out of the title on release. Seeing how it did not pan out the way they wanted, the company dropped a new announcement blog post on their social media.
Riot Games is one of the most important developers known all around for the biggest free-to-play multiplayer titles, League of Legends. Almost a decade ago they company embarked on a journey to expand on the IP with newer spinoff titles. So far, almost all of them have had questionable reception.
History Behind the League Fighting Game
2XKO is a 2v2 fighting game based on the League of Legends IP. Riot Games had announced it a decade ago, along with a few other spin-off titles based on the Runeterra universe, all of which were in a very early development phase.
Primitive news reception around the game’s existence had been widely appreciated all across the video game community, and especially the fighting game community. Most of whom were of the notion that this would be the game that would finally push fighting games as a sub-genre into mainstream popularity.
Fast forward to now, and it seems that quite a lot of things have gone wrong. Over time, the hype around the game dwindled with new developmental iterations completely revamping the original ideas that the team had around the game.
Coupled with the fact that Riot Games possibly expected nothing less than a massive turnout in numbers with the game’s launch. Now it seems like they are slowly pulling the plug on the game, even though it just had an official console launch.
Social Media Reactions Around This News
Social media has been rife with opinions over the news. With some expressing their genuine disappointment over Riot Games taking such a decision.
While the rest of the community is actually being remorseless in enjoying the downfall, since most did not agree with the direction the gameplay was heading.
Amidst all of these, the most affected are the fighting game veterans who were hired by Riot Games to work on the development of 2XKO.
While the general mood around this news has only been doom and gloom, some of the fans of the game are still holding on to the hope that this is not the end, and that Riot is probably downsizing to focus on post-release support.
Riot Games possibly expected too much
The general message that everyone got from the blog post doesn’t allow anyone to muster the courage to have hope. Riot has clearly fired some of the core members of the development team, including the person behind the game’s champion designs.
“The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.” Is what Tom Canon, the executive producer of 2XKO, had to say in the post.
It pretty much suffices to say that Riot Games banked it all on the success of 2XKO on the scale of what Valorant had become, or dare we say even on the heights of League. But that is an absurd amount of expectation to have from a game that was merely trying to fill gaps in a niche genre.
All of this is not to say that the announcement is not an outright rugpull for the game. There will still be support with a major offline championship presence. But the future of 2XKO after that is what everyone will have to wait and find out.
