NetherRealm Studios has revealed that they are bringing crossplay to Mortal Kombat 1, or as they call it, Krossplay.
In a recent tweet on the official Mortal Kombat Twitter account, they said:
“With peace, comes Krossplay. The feature will be included in next week’s patch and supported between PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store). More details coming early next week.”
Unfortunately, NetherRealm Studios is playing catch up here, as their colleagues and competitors in the fighting game genre, such as Street Fighter 6, and Tekken 8, had crossplay as far back as when those games were launched. This very common feature turned out to be a system update for Mortal Kombat 1 that took five months to arrive.
In fact, Mortal Kombat 1 has a real delayed updates problem in general. NetherRealm did promise a steady stream of updates, but has failed to consistently deliver such within these past five months. For example, the stream of playable and Kameo characters did not arrive monthly as they had promised.
Similarly, may issues that the game had across multiple platforms did not get addressed for a long time. Mortal Kombat 1 on Switch may never get a graphics upgrade, but it was also not a stable, playable experience, until very recently.
The big issue that the FGC had with Mortal Kombat 1 was desyncing during online play. The issue had become so persistent that competitive players gave up on the game. Other gamers did have Invasions, a first party mode that allowed them to collect costumes in the pretext that they were fighting alternate universe versions of the same characters.
Like everything else, NetherRealm failed to properly update Invasions, with Season 4 also getting delayed. The desyncing issue was not fixed for a long time, though it seems to have mostly been fixed now.
NetherRealm is apparently planning Season 4 of Invasions to come alongside the pending release of their next DLC character, DC Comics’ Peacemaker. However, if NetherRealm isn’t able to meet their promises of these new Mortal Kombat 1 updates in a timely manner, they will be definitively left behind by other fighting games.
As of this writing, Mortal Kombat 1 is already far from its player peak. SteamDB tells us that the game had an all-time peak of 38,129 concurrent players on Steam near its launch. Today, it has a 1,394 player peak.
The thing with fighting games in 2024 is they have long left behind their roots in the arcades, and now have to be treated like live service games, even if their monetization models aren’t necessarily the same. It does mean that developers have to feed players constant updates to keep fans playing, because that is the way they make money by selling new content to that community in the long term. For NetherRealm, they have lost a lot of their players already, and will have to fight hard to get at least some of them back. Can they do it for Mortal Kombat 1? It all depends on how well they meet their promises.
