Tbf the team made bland shit.

All they did was make KoF with League of Legends characters. The entire game is derivative. They bring absolutely nothing to the table that gives 2XKO its own unique core identity.

They made a niche af fighting game and the result was what happens with all fighting games that aren't Street Fighter, player count decline after launch.

If I were running this project I'd have banned them from copying from other games and forced them to come up with sincerely unique ideas that haven't been done before. I also wouldn't have included a solos mode at all. The identity of the game would have been that you MUST team up with another player, you would play 1 character on the team and the fact that you have to synergise with your partner would become a huge component of skill in the game, on top of making it casual-friendly because the mistakes of duo play are much easier to bare than the personal accountability of getting absolutely bodied in solo play. Over optimisation of character combos would also not be a factor in multiplayer if each player can only play 1 character in a team because they're going to drop combos way more frequently than when 1 player is doing a practiced combo playing both characters simultaneously.

You're also not wrong about marketing not being there, but I suspect the marketing wasn't there because the leadership also recognised the same problems I recognise with the decisions that went into this project, so they decided not to support something they felt was going the wrong direction anyway.