Riot Founder Doesn't Seem to Understand Anything About Fighting Games

Recently, the co-founder of Riot games Marc Merrill went onto the Lemonade Stand podcast. While it was focused on his role in Riot's existence throughout the years, like helping to form a company-wide "culture and vibes" of sexual harassment and discrimination, it also touched up on the recent issues with 2XKO, shedding a lot of additional light on why things played out the way they did.

Perhaps surprising nobody, it seems like unrealistic expectations are once again at play.

Following a segment specifically about 2XKO, Marc Merrill was asked if there's any truth to the public perception that Riot wouldn't be satisfied with anything short of a massive homerun success.

Marc says that this is not true, and Riot's approach to live service games is to stay in the green. They would prefer for a game to do better, but breaking even is considered good enough.

This was followed by an obvious question of how many players 2XKO would need to break even, to which Marc replied with this:

"At their cost structure, it would've been in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions."

Many people have latched onto this statement after assuming that he meant concurrent players, but as the giant pop up in the middle of the screen says, he means Monthly Active Users. Basically how many people worldwide launch this game at least once a month.

However, don't take this as a way to make this seem more reasonable. Obviously trying to reach over a million concurrent players with a tag fighter would be lunacy, far out of the realm of possibility, but even MAU in that range is absurd.

There are few specific numbers here with regards to popular games, but generally there is a correlation between daily averages and monthly active users. A somewhat generous assumption would be that average daily concurrent players make up 3-4% of the monthly active users, but it fluctuate depending on the game.

Casual and popular titles will have lots of players who only launch it once a month and don't play for too long, while for hardcore titles, there might not be too many MAU, because those daily concurrent numbers are made up of people who play almost every day.

With that in mind, Street Fighter 6, a near unprecedented success in the world of fighting games, might be the only game that would reach Riot's expectations. With 30k on average playing on Steam, and no doubt many players on consoles, it likely has at least over a million MAU, with potential for over 2 million, considering how much it reached the casual audience.

Not counting Smash Bros., Tekken 8 might be the only fighting game to get anywhere close, so Riot was essentially banking on this game game becoming an unprecedented success.

Marc also emphasises a focus on steady growth, as League of Legends had pretty humble beginnings itself, but it's hard to say that 2XKO had an opportunity to grow. Half of the team was laid off a month after launch. Six months after those layoffs it was announced that the game will end active development. Starting from the initial open beta in October of last year, the game had 10 months to go from a disastrous launch to a game with millions of monthly active users.

This sort of decision-making doesn't leave too much hope for Riot's upcoming MMO. It has also been in development for roughly 6 years, and they restarted the development entirely in 2024. Considering it's already a massive investment, and MMOs generally require much bigger teams than fighting games, this game will need to find extraordinary success the moment it releases. Otherwise, it's also going to get canned.

By Merrill's own standards, they likely wouldn't even keep working on League of Legends if it released today. He would blame the game for not coming out before Dota 2, being too ambitious, too free-to-play, only connecting with a small group of players, and that would be the end of it.