Arika Vice President Explains Why Adding Crossplay Could Banrupt Them

Fighting EX Layer briefly got a second lease on life recently, when the massive price drop to just one dollar made many new players drop the hesitation and finally give this extremely underappreciated game a try.

With this flood of positivity, came lots of both new and veteran players who are messaging Arika's vice-president, Ichiro Mihara, with their wishes and suggestions for the game's future.

One such suggestion came over on Twitter, where one of the players asked about the possibility of adding crossplay.

Sadly, things are not as simple as we would hope, as Mihara points out, "the costs of maintaining cross-play would go bankrupt." Apparently, to make crossplay a viable and sustainable addition, they'd need to sell over a million copies at full price, with those players also purchasing a season pass. Without that, they would just operate at a loss.

He does add some nuance to this in the follow-up tweet, saying that the cost of implementation and maintenance can depend on the engine. However, with FEXL being over seven years old at this point, it likely wasn't made with that in mind, causing obvious issues.

With that in mind, there still should be hope for FEXL with crossplay at some point in the future, if Arika ever decides to make a sequel. In recent years, they seemingly focused on some of their more successful classics, as well as supportive roles in development of others games, so while they're not in the best position to make a new fighting game, it's not completely out of the question.