2XKO Developer Post-Mortem Leads to a Massive Controversy

Riot recently announced that active development of 2XKO will cease in December of this year. An ending so abrupt that they decided to refund any purchases made before August 20th, and essentially cut the game's only way of making revenue.

All characters will now be unlocked, and the game will have its servers running for the foreseeable future (although some fans are already preparing things for the inevitable shutdown).

This resulted in the most predictable round of discussion about what 2XKO did right or wrong, what can be learned from it, what will this lead to, and more petty conversations about "whose fault is it that this game failed."

In the middle of this, Patrick Miller, who towards the end of his involvement with the game served as its Live Balance producer, release a sort of post-mortem on his Patreon, which offers a fairly candid but also controversial perspective on the game's development. Specifically, Pat's perspective on how he felt about it.

There is a lot to take away from it, but let's start with sobering realism, because one of the first things Pat points out is that the expectations for a Free-to-Play fighting game to be sustainable are quite unrealistic.

Since F2P games generally subsist entirely off of "whales" that spend far more than any other user, the game would also need to enough attract enough users to have those whales match the money of spent of thousands of people buying a 60 dollar game. While game publishers don't see the full 60 from each sale, they still get more per user than F2P games, where majority either spends nothing or very little.

You'd likely need a game that's at least as successful as Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6 to properly sustain this model, although it heavily depends on the scale. However, there is an uncomfortable question to ask in the middle of all this, and the first point of contention in this blog post. Pat points out the following:

"So while I understand that people will look at stuff like Evo registration numbers and think, "Well, it seems to be doing fine," that's "fine" relative to ~$60 paid games, which is not fine for a free-to-play game of comparable development expense."

Did 2XKO have development expenses comparable to other premium titles like the aforementioned Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6? And if so, why? From the consumer perspective, 2XKO always had the presentation of a more budget title. Famously, the game is a tag fighter that launched (as for all intents and purposes it launched in October of 2025) with only 8 characters, very few stages, and nothing resembling single player content. While it has style, it's also not on the same level of fidelity as most premium titles, which should make production of new assets faster and cheaper. That in turn should mean lower expenses, and lower bar of sustainability.

This is all to say, while no doubt any F2P fighting game would face a serious challenge of finding enough players, it shouldn't require your game to eclipse industry leaders to break to become sustainable unless you're making something that is very much on the same level but for free.

It would certainly help if this game wasn't in a niche subgenre of an already niche genre, but it doesn't seem like there is a coherent answer for why specifically tag was chosen as the way to go.

What follows is Pat's more personal take on how he approached the development, and that's the part that has been really making the rounds on social media. Before we get into that, it's important to note that while Pat was in a leadership position, and has seniority on the project, he's not the sole nor main decision make on 2XKO.

Many discussions around this topic make a distinction between Riot and developers as two distinct sides where one is clearly right, while the other one is clearly wrong, but the reality is a less clear cut, and in this case both made mistakes.

With that in mind, Pat says that he doesn't regret how things turned out, and wouldn't do anything differently if he could. He outlines 3 quotes that everyone on development team must've heard from him at some point:

"My job is to figure out how to make an awesome fighting game, making it profitable is someone else's job."
"I'd rather make an interesting failure than a boring success."
"Why not? The worst thing that happens is that we all get fired."

In a vacuum, none of these are bad. Unless you're an indie dev or part of a small team, your objective first and foremost is to make an "awesome game." Whether or not it's something that can or can't sell it publisher's concern. If they don't see the value, the project doesn't get money.

For the second quote, I'm sure most players these days are sick of safe AAA projects that offer the most sterile version of what a game could be. A highly polished product that is too bland, inoffensive, and frictionless to elicit real emotion or produce a memorable experience. Being interesting is far better than being boring, regardless of quality.

The third one is harder to give a positive reading for, but it makes in the context of modern gaming industry. You make a bad game? Laid off. You make a good game? Believe it or not, still laid off. Why second guess your decisions when the worst case scenario is probably not even that different from best case scenario. This drew quite heavy criticism, saying that Pat should've felt more responsible for the livelihood of other developers, especially as someone in a lead position. However, for all we know, everyone else could've shared this perspective, so if someone is going to judge this quote, it should be people who actually worked on 2XKO.

Many other complaints regarding these quotes are more justified, as there is at the very least perceived mismatch between these statements and what 2XKO ended up being, but later quotes add important context to this.

According to Patrick, 2XKO took many risks:

"There are a lot of parts of 2XKO that are riskier bets than other fighting games; free-to-play, active tag, high-powered characters with simple inputs, high rewards for difficult execution, the list goes on."

That's four points, sorry to be unprofessional but you can't say "the list goes on" after listing four things, with more than half of list being rather questionable. Free-to-play is certainly a risk for reasons mentioned above, but the rest? Active tag is also in Invincible VS and Marvel Tokon, not to mention past tag fighters like BBTAG and MvC:I. High-powered characters with simple inputs is a rather vague risk to mention, but should include any "high power" character in recent games that typically come with alternative simple inputs. Finally "high rewards for difficult execution" is something that exists in virtually every fighting game, even streamlined ones, but was even more common in older titles. One of the most popular fighting games of all time, the one that basically revived traditional 2D fighters in 2008, has that.

What follows are several quotes where Pat again reiterates the same idea, that they would rather make something interesting and cool, rather than safe and boring:

"There's no doubt in my mind that we could have made a sustainable business out of a less ambitious project, but, to me, making a boring fighting game success would have been far more disappointing than making a failure we were proud of."

"There is an alternative future where the game was financially stable and utterly devoid of sauce, a future I imagined countless times while we iterated and tested every single character and system in there, and that outcome is far more depressing to me than this one. I probably would have just quit after launch anyway."

"If a game isn't challenging and frustrating, I'm not interested in playing it, nor am I interested in making it, and if given the choice between shipping something boring, or not getting greenlit to ship at all, I'll take the latter every time."

"Working on 2XKO, for me, was the almost unheard-of chance to work on a genre I loved, with a team I cared about, and a very supportive publisher and IP; to squander that chance on something boring and safe, instead of swinging for the fences, would have been the biggest waste I could imagine."

"I sincerely hope that anyone else in the position to take creative risks on the corporate dime does so, the more irresponsible the better, because we have enough boring successes out there already."

It's possible the single biggest point of the article. To take a risk and to make something you truly believe in, even if you think it might not be what others want. This is perhaps why people both defend and criticize these same quotes, with latter having just as good of a reason.

This goal of making something truly risky and ambitious but awesome is nice in theory, but how many would genuinely describe 2XKO as such? At it's core, what really sets 2XKO as a fighting game from other tag fighters? Tekken Tag Tournament 2 already had pair play, so that can't be the big innovation that nobody else dared to do. The only thing that's really left are fusions, and it's basically an iteration on CvS grooves but within the tag format.

There is a talk of too many tag fighters lately, but truly 2XKO still came out in an environment where people had no real choice for modern tag fighters that were decent. You either keep playing DBFZ, or you're playing MvC games through FightCade and Parsec. It wasn't until Tokon that we saw a tag fighter actually take off, and with 4v4 format it's arguably just as if not more ambitious than 2XKO.

It would still be unfair to call 2XKO a bad or boring game, but it certainly didn't deserve a title of "interesting failure," unless by interesting we mean the extraordinary circumstances of its development. All while the most celebrated fighting game this year is Avatar Legends, made by a far smaller team in far less time, but is constantly praised for being an "awesome fighting game," and having "sauce." Something that you rarely heard people say when 2XKO came out.

There is just a massive mismatch here between 2XKO having an unprecedented opportunity of big funding, patient publisher, and total creative freedom. It had every opportunity to be something more, but ended up being what it is.

It is also weird that Pat admits to barely playing the game in the past six months despite talking about making an awesome fighting game, something that he actually believes in, but then again, much of this blog post was at odds with itself. He points points out that there is no doubt they could've made a sustainable project instead:

But then writes that a less ambitious version of 2XKO, which would've resembled other titles, would never be as good as those titles, nor have a chance of being truly succesful.

"If you find yourself asking "Well, why didn't they just do [X]?" the answer is probably "Because we didn't think doing [X] would make the game better, nor would we do [X] better than everyone else does [X]." If 2XKO was just another Strive or Tekken or Granblue or Street Fighter with League characters, we would not really contributing anything new or worthwhile to the genre, nor would we be building anything that had a reasonable shot at hitting the top spot.

If you want something positive, the low level, core takeaway from this blog is agreeable. You should make what you love, and something you believe in. You should value yourself as a person and put your personal interests before the interests of a faceless company that doesn't care about you.

However, these simple points were conveyed in maybe the worst way possible, and are nestled in-between attempts to rationalize mistakes with the kind of reasoning that doesn't survive under scrutiny.