2XKO’s $100 Arcane Skins Are the Latest Bummer for Fighting Game Fans

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 8, 2025 | 3:00pm

Video Games Features 2xko

2XKO’s $100 Arcane Skins Are the Latest Bummer for Fighting Game Fans

Yesterday, Riot’s long-anticipated League of Legends-themed fighting game, 2XKO, finally entered Early Access after being announced way back in 2019. The launch went reasonably well. While many (including myself) experienced login issues in the first 15 minutes after it went live, it didn’t take long before things stabilized, letting players get at the two new characters, Teemo and Warwick, introduced following the game’s previous month-long closed beta.

However, there was one rude awakening that came with this free-to-play game’s launch day: its monetization of cosmetics seems quite bad. Case in point, the only way to get the game’s very cool Arcane-themed skins is to pay $100.

While some of the details about the various in-game currencies were already disclosed, the precise costs were not, leading to sticker shock as players visited the store for the first time. For instance, it costs about $20 to get a “Legendary” skin (specifically, it costs 2,000 KO points for a skin and $20 to get 2,200 points)—while there are lower rarity skins, it doesn’t appear like they’re being offered in the shop at the moment. Worse, the store has only four rotating slots that are randomized for each player, meaning it’s very unlikely that it will even have something for one of your characters. These slots take two weeks to switch out, meaning you have to get relatively lucky to even get the opportunity to spend $20 on the thing you’re looking for. It’s a fairly blatant attempt at getting players to splurge due to the perceived limited availability of these items.

The Battlepass seems more “affordable” in that it’s 1,000 KO points and contains multiple skins, but it has its own problems, like the lack of a means to earn back currency and how it’s filled with way more lobby cosmetics than ones for characters—I want to be in these lobbies for as little time as humanly possible, so I don’t really care about decking out my little guy.

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And then there are the starter editions. The base starter edition is $30 for 2,000 KO points and four champion tokens (as you can probably guess, these are used to unlock characters), and the deluxe is $60 for eight tokens, 3,000 KO points, and a few lobby cosmetics. And then there’s the big one, the ultra edition, which is the only way to get the sleek skins for Vi, Ekko, and Jinx that are styled after their appearances in season 2 of Arcane: we have Vi’s angry goth look after she got dumped by her girlfriend, Ekko’s Firelight uniform, and Jinx’s outfit for the finale. For $100, you get these three skins, alongside eight character tokens, 5,000 KO points, and a few other cosmetics. Again, these are only available in this bundle, which I think is the main point of frustration for many.

As someone who has very much enjoyed what I’ve played of 2XKO, is a fan of Arcane, and mains Vi and Ekko, I was honestly ready to pay for these skins and support the cool fighting game that I like, but $100 is well beyond what I’d consider remotely reasonable. It all very much makes it seem like the game’s shop is being targeted at one-off “high spenders” rather than a more general crowd.

Sure, it’s great that the game lets players earn characters for free. They go for 1,000 KO points (the paid currency) or 10,000 credits (a currency you can earn by playing the game), and you can also unlock them by participating in “Recruitment Events” where you redeem Battle Pass XP to get the new champion for free—how long it will reasonably take to do this is vague because Season 0 doesn’t have a Recruitment Event, but it sounds fine in theory. You can also try out characters in the practice mode or locally without having unlocked them, which is a genuinely excellent inclusion that more fighting games should have, because it lets you get a taste for the character before you buy and also allows you to lab out solutions to characters with tricky options without needing to buy them.

I get it, the game has to make money somehow or whatever, and I’d much rather have the monetization be around optional cosmetics than the characters themselves. This is a free-to-play game that was in development for six years, and the team plans on putting out a fairly impressive five characters a year (Street Fighter 6 only hits four), which you’ll be able to unlock for free compared to those other games where you usually have to pay $30-ish bucks for a season pass. The game doesn’t feature loot boxes or gacha (even if the rotating store is trying to trigger the same kind of FOMO impulse buy). While I would very much enjoy earning cool skins, not being able to get them isn’t a total deal breaker for me, even if I’m a bit livid that I can’t play as angry oil slick Vi.

But the thing is, the pricing in the shop sort of reeks of desperation. It wasn’t that long ago that Riot more or less pulled the plug on its excellent digital CCG, Legends of Runeterra, after laying off most of its staff and cutting support for PvP play. That spectre very much looms over this game, which, at least from an outside perspective, seems to have been released well after when it was supposed to (I can’t imagine they’d have announced it six years ago knowing it would take this long to come out).

This anxiety of the game failing is all the more weighty because 2XKO has the potential to be a truly excellent fighting game: while its launch roster is quite small for a tag fighter at 11 characters, each of them plays quite differently and have kits that range from relatively interesting to some of the coolest designs I’ve seen in a modern genre entry (Ekko is so rad man, he travels through time to do evil mix-ups). Additionally, the game lowers the barrier to entry with multiple means of assisting beginners without sacrificing high-level depth, something that many recent fighting games have tried and very few have succeeded at. Its tag system is freeform with plenty of room for player expression, and its defensive mechanics encourage interactivity and varied pressure. There are certainly some problems to fix, but it’s an excellent starting spot. Unfortunately, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if its free-to-play model brings everything crashing down.

I understand that the prices in the in-game store are analogous to what Riot has been charging in Valorant, and it seems to “work” for that game, insofar as they’ve found a demographic to exploit, but I’m not necessarily convinced that it will pan out here. After the first month or so of a fighting game’s release, their playerbases tend to be largely made up of little freaks who have the patience to spend hours practicing combos, blockstrings, setups, hit confirms, defensive situations, and untangling whatever the hell the term “fuzzy” means. While these players are frequently willing to dish out money for a new game and for season passes that come with additional characters, I’m not sure these are the same types who will purchase a $200 knife in Counter Strike. Maybe they are, but honestly, I doubt it.

The thing is, shooters and MOBAs tend to attract a much larger audience, which probably makes it likely that some small percentage of people will be “big spenders.” In contrast to many other types of games, any Elon Musk-like posers with their several-hundred-dollar status symbol skins will likely crumble fairly quickly as the opposing Vi Electric juggles them from corner to corner. This is a genre that heavily incentivizes players to engage deeply with their systems, something that fly-by tech execs and other nouveau riche a-holes trying to cater to a “gamer” demographic probably aren’t going to do.

But more important than whether the game fails or not, the idea of it continuing to exist due to fleecing a small number of people for exorbitant amounts of money just feels fundamentally gross. Sure, it’s possible that some of these high spenders (who are dehumanizingly referred to as whales in the gambling industry) are frankly very well off and have the disposable income to spend exorbitant sums on digital costumes without it materially affecting them in any way (the fact that this is true is its own much bigger problem). But I guarantee that plenty of high spenders in these games are not that kind of person, and are instead folks who struggle with the types of impulse control problems you commonly see with gambling. It simply does not feel good when a game’s monetization is either aimed at letting rich people flex on the “poors” with their $100 skin or is targeted at psychologically manipulating people who can’t afford it, but will buy it anyway: it’s a very bad time either way. It certainly doesn’t help Riot’s case that the company has been on the receiving end of gender discrimination lawsuits in the past due to a toxic workplace culture, and while the 2XKO team wasn’t directly involved with this (it was an outside company that was acquired by Riot around when these allegations came out), that doesn’t change where the money is going.

These days, it’s increasingly difficult to ethically consume much of anything, and that general shroud of late-stage capitalist shittiness has very much found its way to fighting games. Specifically, the Saudi Arabian government, which has committed numerous human rights abuses, has begun to stake its claim in the scene via its Public Investment Fund (PIF), purchasing a majority stake in King of Fighters publisher SNK. Its presence was felt in some of the incredibly baffling character selections in the company’s recent Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, which included two PIF-friendly celebrities, Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci, as playable characters.

The PIF also funds the Esports World Cup, which featured a one-million-dollar prize pool for Street Fighter 6 earlier this year, a sum bigger than what’s offered in everything besides the officially sponsored Capcom Cup (which also has become worse in that it’s now charging pay-per-view for some reason). This tournament takes place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a place that many queer members of the scene rightfully don’t want to visit because LGBT people are aggressively persecuted in the country (homosexuality is illegal and technically punishable by death). If that wasn’t enough, the PIF also recently became a co-owner of EVO, the tournament series that’s built up a reputation as the biggest and most prestigious fighting game competition in the world (interestingly enough, 2XKO’s producer Tom Cannon co-founded the tournament back when it was grassroots). And all of that’s not even to mention the fact that Riot itself has partnered with the Saudi Arabian government in the past. Basically, it’s becoming harder and harder to engage with the space without running into the moral dilemma of your money directly funneling towards a government that murders journalists and oppresses large swathes of people.

While the fighting game scene has certainly never been perfect, I miss when I mostly thought of it on relatively positive terms, as a diverse community disproportionately made up of people of color and queer folks who accomplish the sickest shit you’ve ever seen. They certainly haven’t gone away, but now the shroud of sportswashing and corporate nonsense has made it harder to be enthusiastic about those accomplishments.

Although 2XKO’s overpriced skins are nowhere near as grave an issue as the PIF’s involvement in the scene, the point is that a lot of fighting game fans, myself included, are feeling a little beleaguered at this point. Yes, there are still plenty of people in the space who are critical of the way things are going, and there’s no shortage of community-run tournaments to support. Most games still use a more standard “you pay 60 bucks” monetization scheme with minimal live-service psychological manipulation. But that doesn’t change how disappointing it is to see how quickly things have pivoted in this nightmarish direction.

Based on how 2XKO pans out, the game will either 1) be successful with its somewhat sleezy model, 2) not be successful and we’ll lose a very good game, or 3) the folks in charge of fiscal decisions at Riot will listen to the community’s response and change course. The third one may not be as likely as I would hope, but I think fighting game fans need a bit of good news right now.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.