At least from when the beta was pulled down
The space of platform fighting games has been growing at a more rapid pace this past decade or so though none of the newer attempts have managed to match or eclipse the success of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.
It sounds like Riot Games was aiming to take their own shot at capturing the attention of players with a League of Legends platform fighter of their own, but that’s apparently the case no longer.
Riot recently canceled an unannounced title that was allegedly inspired by Super Smash Bros. Melee specifically according to a new report from Mikhail Klimentov at ReaderGrev.
The internal project was said to be codenamed Pool Party with roughly around 70–80 developers / employees attached to the now defunct game idea.
It is not currently known how long the League platform fighter was being worked on, but the report describes it as still being a prototype.
Going after the Smash Melee crowd would have put Riot as chasing the most hardcore platform audience out there with plans to support the game’s eSports scene much more than Nintendo ever has although that original pitch is said to have started to shift to include more party game and casual aspects too.
This is entirely separate from 2XKO (formerly Project L), which is Riot’s upcoming 2v2 fighting game that’s set to release in 2025.
Riot just revealed Braum for 2XKO yesterday, so it looks like work is still full steam ahead on that free-to-play fighter receiving its first closed alpha test next month.
There were rumors a few years back that Project L would be a platfrom fighter, which obviously wasn’t the case, but now sounds like there was two different projects running at pretty much the same time.
One interesting note from the report is the cancelation came after a “reassessment fo consumer appetite for a Smash competitor.”
Riot executives in particular were allegedly spooked by the perceived “failure” of MultiVersus from Warner Bros.
It’s not stated, however, if that failure was referring to the original open beta being scrapped last year or the full launch of MultiVersus in May.
A follow-up post from Klimentov made it sound like the former situation though.
One thing I heard over and over about Pool Party: all the weird stuff around MultiVersus in 2023 made execs at Riot nervous about shipping a platform fighter.
The vision for the project shifted, and then it was canceled. pic.twitter.com/FOp56kqgdi
— ℳikhail Klimentov (@LeaderGrev) July 10, 2024
At the time of its full release, MultiVersus was able to reach a peak concurrent player count of over 114,000 players on Steam alone, which didn’t live up to the beta launch peak of 153,000, but is still larger than any other fighting game record on PC.
Now, MultiVersus has been sitting around an average of 7,200 players on Steam at any given time the past month according to Steam Charts, so while that number is significantly dwindled, that still puts it in the upper echelon of fighting games being played and supported.
There have been a few success cases like Brawlhalla managing to build a free-to-play platform fighter audience and an eSports scene, but many others have fallen far short of Smash’s summit.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and its sequel both tried to thread the needle between casual play and hardcore mechanics and never really quite caught on with either crowd unfortunately.
it was gonna be specficially a “melee-like” platform fighter I’m gonna be sick https://t.co/H8VWFLNaal
— hungrybox (@LiquidHbox) July 10, 2024
Unsurprisingly, some Smash pros have been disappointed in reactions to the report about Pool Party with the hopes of more support for their favorite genre though it’s impossible to know what the game would have eventually become.
This all also comes after a pretty rough year for the video game industry in terms of layoffs, studio closures and project cancelations, which were said to eclipse the entirety of 2023’s total numbers by June.
With Brawlhalla, MultiVersus, Nickelodeon and soon to be Rivals of Aether 2 continuing to try and go up against Smash, it’s going to be interesting to see where exactly the platform fighter genre goes from here into the next steps as Nintendo’s plans for what to do with their mega-hit remains unknown.