2XKO Is Not Dead

I’ve known 2XKO in some shape or form nearly as long I’ve been around the fighting game community.

When Rising Thunder’s preview on PCGamer hit the internet I was only vaguely aware of the “FGC”. I got into the Rising Thunder alpha test in August of 2015, and though I never got to try the game back then since I didn’t have a PC capable of playing it I was still excited by what was being promised. Everything about a PC-first, free-to-play fighting game that ditched those maligned motion inputs and had actually good netcode sounded novel and killer in 2015, even to a casual like me. I really wanted to play it someday (now I can, and you can too!). Plus I really liked the idea of a fighting game with robots. (I’m still sad Metal Revolution never made it to the finish line either.)

Rising Thunder’s developer Radiant Entertainment being acquired by Riot Games was a big statement even with nothing to announce in 2016 aside from ending development on RT. While many people who weren’t around before 2019 will look back on the hype for “Project L” as an impossible bar to meet, the truth is the progression of major fighting game releases from 2016 to 2018 made it so easy to make “wait for Riot’s game” the butt of every joke about Street Fighter V. Just the suggestion that somewhere in California, the company behind League of Legends was funding the smartest men in the community to build a fighting game cast a long shadow on the discourse surrounding the future of this niche genre. With the reputation League of Legends had at the time, it seemed like every other team in the space might be living on borrowed time.

If you weren’t around to experience the rampant speculation about the impending cataclysm of the FGC as we knew it from 2016 to 2019, please watch Brian_F’s history video from about 9:35 onward. It is reflective of how I experienced that time as well.

Here’s a snapshot of the online discourse circa 2017:

(Side note but I think prior to the COVID pandemic there was a serious belief that “esports” was going to be competing with physical sports for space. Heroes of the Storm was on ESPN in 2015! These kinds of publicity stunts were done to make the competitive community feel validated. If you weren’t around in that time that probably sounds really silly with how big streaming has gotten and how big sports is with young people now.)

The initial reveal of Project L could not have struck at a better time. Fighting games by and large had bad netcode and crappy anemic post-launch support. Some would say they still do! But the team at Riot showed us high quality graphics, smoke test footage that made the team look very serious about this job, and promise of good netcode before Guilty Gear Strive made waves for not being unplayable online. The hype was real.

The discourse surrounding “fighting games as products” is pretty insufferable in my opinion. It’s largely focused on growth before anything else. Everyone has an opinion on what would make “fighting games grow”, this notion that if only Capcom/Namco/ArcSys only listened to what a random guy on Twitch chat has to say everyone would be playing fighting games and watching them on ESPN. What a lot of those random people seemed to agree on though was that whatever was needed to make fighting games grow, Riot Games would figure it out for us.

Fast forward to 2026. 2XKO somehow manages to both release with an anemic amount of characters and still rank highly on tournament registration leaderboards across the community. The fighting game community is thoroughly engaged, despite many people claiming the game wasn’t being advertised well enough or that the name sucks or that the game needs to add Sett or it will die. The fighting game landscape of 2026 is nowhere near where it was in 2019, and that’s really only to the detriment of 2XKO. A lot changed since then, but I think the single biggest point is that Street Fighter 6 was a massive success that set a new bar for the genre, one that the original vision Radiant Entertainment had for the genre in 2015 made manifest nearly 10 years later was simply not equipped to respond to. With hindsight I think 2XKO would’ve mauled the competition in 2019 but a worldwide pandemic really forced a change for the better. Long live Rollbackia.

The time it took for 2XKO to release is often high on the list of talking points when people discuss what went wrong, but I don’t think it’s all that surprising. Video games are becoming ever more expensive and time consuming to make, and even with all the smart people behind this game there simply was not a pipeline to build and ship a fighting game beforehand. I suspect that whatever did exist in a file server somewhere for Rising Thunder would’ve been a workable base for a scrappy indie game in 2013, but it was not going to cut it for a fighting game based on the massively popular League of Legends IP. This is just the complicated tech stuff before you consider building a live service team to release characters and marketable skins at a rapid clip.

Despite what the team might say I think it would be very interesting to know how that snippet of gameplay from 2019 ended up changing so drastically into 2XKO’s early access build releasing a whole 6 years later. The answer might simply be “COVID”, but I do want to know what happened in the 3 years from Radiant’s acquisition in 2016 to the reveal of Project L and then the pivot that must’ve surely followed shortly after. I suspect a lot of difficult building of the team and software stack needed to ship a fighting game of any kind, followed by a change in the creative vision. (Former producer Pat Miller shared a bit about that time here.)

Yesterday, Riot Games announced “with a heavy heart” that 2XKO’s development would end in December 2026 and that all monetization was being removed in favor of a $40 cosmetic bundle coming with the final patch. The wording in this announcement sat wrong with me in ways that motivated me to write this post. This announcement reveals the clash between the reality of fighting games and the expectations of management who themselves seem to be hopelessly high on their own supply.

I think you should read the whole thing first, then I’d like to talk about the overall vibe of the announcement which can be best summed up with this passage:

On the business side, we hoped that by making the game free, we could make the genre more accessible and discoverable to new players, and that they could fall in love with fighting games in the same way we did. Ideally this would have happened over time, starting by earning the trust of lots of core fighting game players, and growing into a larger playerbase when more features and content came online. We also went into this project knowing from the start that free-to-play comes with a minimum player requirement to support these ambitions.

This passage reads to me like the development team knew this game was going to release into a tough market and require Riot’s commitment to build up into a juggernaut game with an unparalelled value proposition. The problem is that Riot Games does not have any interest in doing that. This became very obvious when they laid off half the team working on the game shortly after launch, which despite what copium huffers on Twitter might tell you is not the sign of a game being supported in the long term.

This announcement being posted about 4 months before active development is actually scheduled to end makes for a strange scenario, where several 2XKO Competitive Series tournaments are going to highlight the excellent competition the game brings to the table while the community will be either joking about or avoiding bringing up that this is a “dead game” walking. With two characters still on the way this announcement’s timing needlessly sabotage’s the community’s momentum. I suspect the business bought into hype, and no matter what happens to the game after yesterday they simply want to wash their hands of the whole thing. The FGC has been burned. I wish the team the best of luck in putting the game into a comfortable place for its final patch.

The vibe around this announcement on social media has also lead to varying degrees of eulogies from people or groups involved in the community mourning the loss of a game that is otherwise going to be “content complete”. Some organizers even blame themselves for not doing enough. (Don’t do that.) Flyquest’s “solid background with text” post has a tone that I think could simply be avoided:

2XKO is going to stay online, will continue to be free to play (now with all characters unlocked), and will have a reasonable roster size of 17 when it’s all said and done. It’s not the outcome anyone hoped for, but we’ll still have a damn good fighting game at the end of it all. I suspect for many people who weren’t on the dev team, making a good game was not the expectation: The expectation was living up to hype that has cast a shadow on the community for over a decade. I do not envy those who did their best to deliver in that context.

I truly enjoy playing 2XKO. Start.gg says I’ve run 6 editions of my local tournament WARRING TRIAD with 2XKO on the lineup. Despite my misgivings with many aspects of the game I really did give it the shot I felt it deserved. I’m sure many people in the community bought into the hype, tried out the game and genuinely loved what they were playing. Joy often comes from complicated places, and this is certainly no exception. If my time as a community organizer can serve me to impart any wisdom, it’s this: The game is yours now. Fighting games possess a unique quality in being able to be enjoyed with another player locally, something that has lent it a space somewhere between martial arts and chess. (Pat can tell you about that better than I can.) What this means practically is that they can be enjoyed forever, and that’s exactly what I would encourage anyone reading this who enjoys 2XKO to do.