Jarkey Bacon

My heart goes out to the 2XKO team. It’s a big blow to the fighting game community and game development in general to have this project stop active development. Our projects are pretty delicately linked as our team at Aether Studios set out to achieve a similar goal for the platform fighter genre as the 2XKO team was attempting for the traditional fighting game community. Before our Kickstarter, we pitched to publishers and investors and we even had Project L listed as a north star of what we were looking to do. Now that we’re both on the other side of releases, it’s easy to come up with a ton of little reasons that were “oh so obvious” as to why it’s been hard to attract and retain players. But at the end of the day, the current landscape for multiplayer games is brutal. You either bottle lightning, go out of business immediately, or like our projects, struggle to release frequent updates that can steer your project toward financial sustainability. And you can say, “Why even attempt a live service then? People liked boxed games.” Most multiplayer games today are live services even if they didn’t intend it. They might have a less grueling release schedule, but every successful multiplayer game including fighting games are either still in active development or had a multi-year DLC schedule that has now concluded while we wait for the next game in the series. By the end of Rivals 1 development, it felt like we were running a live service out of a game that was meant to take just a few months to create in Game Maker. We were constantly running into issues trying to expand that game, and there were many times we wanted to give up development during the 10 years of updates the first game received. So we looked at a game like League of Legends and later 2XKO to help guide our development plans for Rivals 2. We designed updates in a way that would generate income every month while also having bigger content drops for the less committed players to return to. And it worked! But at a much smaller scale than a AAA game would need or even where we hoped we might be. We’re still operating at around 10x the Rivals 1 numbers had before workshop launched. But a 3D game is much more expensive to build and maintain. We’re still struggling to stay sustainable. If we had the same burn rate as the 2XKO team, we wouldn’t even be close. It’s a good thing we didn’t stretch ourselves to launch on console right away, because our engineering burn would not be possible to pay the team and update and bug fix the game on multiple platforms with the numbers we have now. We would have had to stop development by now. One difference between the two projects now is that Riot Games as a company will still exist after 2XKO ceases active development. Aether Studios does not have that same luxury. If Rivals 2 falls then so does Aether Studios and so does my livelihood. We have no other option and we will keep working until the wheels fall off completely. I know people on 2XKO team who are in a similar position to me. They were there to make a fighting game. So the end of this project is the end of a dream. I hope they find something awesome to do next, and they are in a good spot personally. Because there were so many right decisions made on that project. But at the end of the day, you need to attract and retain players for the business to work. And that’s our job now when making a competitive multiplayer videogame.