Before I break down the reasons, here are some facts most relevant to casual players, the game is dead, the only way it could be more dead is if the servers get taken down

• SF6 and tekken 8 on an uneventful day get over 20k players and over 16k viewers/ mk1 when a major dlc is released or teased it gets less than 2k players and less than 800 viewers
• ^ in this same vein, mk1 is so bad that for 12 out of the 13 months it has been running mk11 has had more daily players, a game with no crossplay, that has not been updated in 5 years is more lively than mk1 in year 1
• the turn out for mk1 pro comp was so bad that nrs panicked and doubled the prize pool to try and draw in more attendees, the result? It got less than 280 registrations compared to tekken and sf getting over 1,600 each
• vsf, the biggest offline competition in the UK MK1 was deemed so irrelevant the venue wasnt even going to host it, it only ended up being included because 2 UK brothers whose entire life has been paid for by commentating mk took care of everything, they provided the consoles, the game, handled registrations and brackets. In year 1 the game is so irrelevant it didn't even get a prize pool, so the brothers handled that too. Fair play to them for putting in the effort, but the end result for all of this? A venue that had hundreds upon hundreds of people playing sf and/or tekken in the main building had mk1 in a tiny office room on the second floor, the prizes were mk merch from the brothers which were scorpion funko pops worth about 12gbp and in total the event had 51 attendees for mk1. SF and tekken had more staff supervising the events than mk had competing
• at one of the events, possibly ECT. It is a fighting game event, a venue is hired specifically for fighting game tournaments. A mortal kombat compeition with a cash prize pool had fewer people attend than a mario kart tournament set up by the community for fun for people to play in between waiting for their brackets. A building full of people willing to pay and travel to play fighting games and there were still so few people interested in mortal kombat that mario kart got more attention
• mk11 was abandoned on launch, yet was still lively enough that 4 years later people like mrblack, makorani, r1psarena, titaniumtigers were able to quit "normal" jobs and stream full time. MK1 is so objectively dead in year 1 that mrblack only streams tekken, makoran rarely streams, r1ps is considering returning to office work despite having a health condition that would make that very difficult to sustain and people like deoxys and titanium quit streaming all together

You can look at the game through a competitive or casual lense, the statistics we have do not change, nobody is playing, watching or competing in this game.

Gameplay -Fatal blow was universally loathed for being a cheap insta win button that rewarded losing in 11, nrs ignored all the feedback and brought it back -Towers of time was unanimously regarded as the worst part of mk11, all tedium no fun. Nrs doubled down in 1 and made invasions, which is towers of time but it takes 5 hours instead of 20 minutes, now you need to complete 5 seperate "worlds" all containing dozens of towers and the towers are spaced out on a horrendous grid system where you move a deformed sprite around an empty world with worse graphics and mobile games before you have the pleasure of grinding another tedious tower

• Online is pathetic, objectively the worst net code in gaming
• tekken 8 released with online issues, bandai namco put out a day 1 patch that addressed all of them, mk1 has been out 13 months and nrs have still not bothered to fix or even stabilize their online
• no rooms, so trying to coordinate matches is needlessly difficult and a process that took seconds in mk11 takes upwards of 10 minutes in 1
• same kl system as 11 that assigns arbitrary points for winning or losing meaning the grind is worse, slower and the rewards are harder to attain than any other fitghting game
• with updates it takes over 140gb to install yet has less than 10gb of content, by comparison games like dbz and NSUNS4 have 3x the amount of stages, 4x the amount of characters, 8x the amount of music, 20x the amount of customisable moves/cinematics and they take less than 40gb
• characters like johnny and kenshi have such blatant and objective advantages over everyone else on the roster they have been "top tier" since launch
• The top tiers have multiple meterless launchers, high damage, fast normals, good range, safe normals and strings, by contrast characters like quan have "armour" that is broken with a single hit, a 2 bar launcher, unsafe strings, unsafe normals, unsafe pokes, unsafe jump ins and they need to use all their resources to break 30%
• no crossplay at launch
• when crossplay was finally launched it was in literally unplayable state
• the combat is more one dimensional and every character has just 1 combo and 1 combo route, the entirety of the gameplay can factually be summarised as spam pokes until 1 lands>safe sting>safe ender, all the while the "assist" system has no gameplay, no "creativity" despite what nrs claimed pre release and they are just spam, the single most poorly implemented tag assist system ever
• the way to unlock gear is " the shrine" which is a 45 second load screen where you can only unlock 1 item at a time, by contrast mk11 had a pseudo open world krypt you could run around, interact with the environment, interact with the kollector as a shop and there were multiple secrets/easter eggs to uncover, mk1 the unlock system is literally a single zero effort load screen
• Every single character release has seen a character released in a broken state, broken hitboxes, double speed bug, infinite flight, no scaling on combos, etc etc
• Every single patch has introduced more bugs into the game
• Every single "hotfix" has introduced more bugs on top of the existing bugs

Misc -Graphics are a massive downgrade from 11

• Fatalities and brutalities are the worst they've ever been
• PC port was outsourced to the exact same company who botched the 11 pc port so badly nrs had to bring in a second company just to bring the game to a barely functional state
• runs at 30 fps ( an entire year after release they put out a "60fps patch" but said patch only changes the frame rate in the menus not gameplay making it 100% redundant)
• the game was out for an entire year, did not get bugs fixed, did not get online fixed, did not get frame rate patch, did not get any balance patches that worked....... but they released "khaos reigns" for 50gbp, a dlc containing 3 main characters, 2 guests and a terrible story mode that takes 1 hour to complete and they charged it at the same price as full release triple A games

Story: -The story is the least mk content you'll ever see, in mk11 Liu kang turned kronika to glass and shattered her, in the dlc he watched his friends die because he thought it a worthy price to pay for "the greater good". In mk1, the entire time people refuse to kill, drone on about "mercy", sektor attacks an unarmed woman on her wedding day then spends the rest of her screen time talking about "respect". Every single problem that happens in both base game and dlc are caused by poor writing making the characters do blatantly idiotic things.

-On top of that the story is lazy to it's very core, it is another generic, zero effort multiverse slop fest. Instead of writing a cohesive narrative or developing characters, they just have a million different versions of the characters which are one dimensional caricatures. "khaos havik's" entire "personality" is "i love khaos......because I love khaos", all khaos variants "personality" is " I love khaos........because I love khaos". Frost got maybe 5 minutes of screen time in mk11 and she had more character and personality than the entire multiverse in mk1

• Also on topic of it being a multiverse, it renders the story of mk11 100% pointless because not only does it undo what happened in 11 but by having multiple other versions of the same characters in addition to undoing the plot beats of mk11, they also retcon every single scene
• Lastly on the story, the premise of the dlc is "khaos havik", a "story" in which a character who claims to want to spread khaos maintains an army of followers obeying his orders, relishing in the same passtime as him and living in obedience, in other words "khaos" havik is establishing an empire of order, if you can think of any plausible explanation for how that self contradicting "plot" was never noticed by anyone on nrs staff over years of "writing", scripting, screen writing, choreographing, story boarding, drawing, animating, dubbing and editing, you are more intelligent than I.