"We've got nobody to blame but ourselves, right? I think we had a window to do some great things to really help the fighting game community, and then Street Fighter 6 game out, which was 8 years after we started working on [2XKO]. We had an awesome development team of really talented people that did great work and made a beautiful game.
"… It resonated with some players, but not nearly enough players in order to justify the type of live service long-tail approach that the game was designed to do … At their cost structure, it would've been in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions [of monthly users to keep it live service]," via the Lemonade Stand podcast.
I am trying very very hard not to make the deeply presumptuous statement that the co-founder of Riot Games, ostensibly one of the most successful gaming companies in the world, doesn't know what he's doing. I am emphatically not doing that, actually—but it's why I'm so deeply confused.
2XKO ending its development (which Merrill phrases here as turning it into a "box game" instead, despite the fact Riot also laid off a bunch of people to make that happen), came as a deep frustration, but not much of a surprise given the current nightmare year the industry's been having. However—that number, "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions", is a somewhat desperate number.
Especially given the podcast has an annotation of monthly active users (MAU), which one'd assume would mean they asked Merrill for clarification. An active user is a unique user that logs in and does something at least once during a month, which means that the number would be far higher than concurrent users (how many of those users are logged in at any one time).
However, we can at least make some very loose guesstimates. Street Fighter 6 has a 30,000 concurrent peak on PC at the time of writing. Let's assume the average person has a seven hour window during a day to play, accounting for a nine to five job or chores/social obligations on the weekend—the concurrent count doesn't actually jump that much.
So let's say that in a 24 hour period, you've got around 30-35% of your potential playerbase online at any given moment. The rest are sleeping, working, running errands, etc. That leaves SF6 with roughly 100,000 people who are consistently playing the game on PC every day.
I wanna note: This is by no means an accurate number, it's kitchen napkin math and guesswork that assumes there's an even amount of SF6 players in each time zone and that they each have the same daily schedule but look, I'm working with what I have here (Capcom doesn't have monthly active users info available).
Let's be extremely generous and say only 25% play on PC, something that likely isn't even the case, I'm steelmanning myself here—that still leaves us with 400,000 players total in a 24-hour period. Monthly active users, though, is simply a tallying of: "Did this person log in at any point during the month". Assuming no new players came to SF6, that 400,000 daily total player count wouldn't change its impact on the MAU number.
Which means that you'd have to be getting in a lot of new or returning players every single day to bump up the monthly unique player count to anywhere near one million. SF6 has sold 7 million units total between June 2023 and June 2026. Even if you spread that out over the 36 months between those two dates (unlikely, sales are usually frontloaded) that'd still be just 194,444 potential additions to the pool every month.
In other words, even if you take one of the most popular fighting games in the world, with the most generous read possible on its total daily active user count, with the most disadvantageous PC/Console split to make my point, you'd still barely get over the 500,000 monthly active user mark. Shy of "high hundreds of thousands", and certainly shy of "millions" plural.
The comparison becomes weirder when you compare it to other fighting games that are still receiving support. Guilty Gear: Strive is still getting new characters and updates, and that has a 24-hour concurrent peak of 1,580.
In other words: There was no way in hell that 2XKO was ever going to get enough in the way of players to satisfy its expectations, which leaves a lot of questions here. Did Riot as a company just get overconfident from less niche genres? Did it not do the market research? Were the 2XKO developers just super inefficient?
Or did it simply have enough money to, like many studios before it, simply gamble and see if it could create something even better than Street Fighter 6—rolling the dice on the livelihoods of the developers who were making it? None of the answers to those questions are particularly flattering.
