// PC GAMER — GAMING
Riot needed absurd player counts 'in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions' for 2XKO, dooming it from launch
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"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.