- Primary Subject: 2XKO Game Development
- Key Update: Former Riot dev Patrick Miller's "interesting failure" philosophy contributed to 2XKO's downfall.
- Status: Analysis
- Last Verified: 2026-08-25
- Quick Answer: Check out a former Riot developer's controversial views on why the live-service fighting game 2XKO failed.
2XKO not making it past its first year as a live-service game is a tragedy, given how strong the foundation was. Social media is a hodgepodge of people pointing fingers and looking for someone or something to blame. Stoking the fire, former Riot employee Patrick Miller, also known as pattheflip, shared his experiences after working on the project for over a decade.
The lengthy article was shared on Pat’s Patreon page, which is free to access. I recommend you give it a complete read as it’s very insightful. That being said, there are quite a few questionable takes fans learned from it. The biggest takeaway from the article was Patrick’s decision to push in meetings the idea that he’d “rather make an interesting failure than a boring success.”
Miller, who served as a designer and producer on multiple key aspects of 2XKO’s gameplay, added: “My job is to figure out how to make an awesome fighting game; making it profitable is someone else's job." Now, he’s not entirely wrong. But at the end of the day, pushing these narratives when there are livelihoods on the line does feel rather disingenuous, even if Miller repeatedly states he never held a position of leadership within the company.
Among the riskier choices he claims the team took were making 2XKO free-to-play—keeping it in line with Riot’s MO when it comes to live-service titles—and introducing gameplay additions such as active tag mechanics, characters with extremely broken kits, and lowering the entry barrier by removing motion inputs (while maintaining high execution to unlock each Champion’s true potential). 2XKO could’ve been criticized for plenty of things, but being boring to watch or play was not one of them.
Miller expanded on his idea of preferring to make a memorable failure rather than a forgettable, but steady success: “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.”
Again, this all sounds pretty idealistic. Standing against corporate, sanitized gameplay by providing a challenging but really fun-to-learn fighting game sounds much better than a mediocre product that exists to satisfy the higher-ups' pockets—and not much else.
Yet, this is Riot Games we're talking about. They've taken the seemingly impenetrable MOBA gameplay from Dota and turned it into League of Legends; they mixed a little bit of Overwatch with CS:GO to create a middle ground called Valorant. Making games that are much easier to access but still deep enough to be engaging in the long run is what they're known for.
The reality of the situation is that, as Miller explained, the game was quite clearly made for really hardcore FGC veterans, alienating the crowd that would have sustained the project for more than a year. I commend the dev team for taking a step out of their comfort zone; I really do, as you can read here, but a middle ground should’ve been found—one that allowed League of Legends fans to check out a brand-new genre while giving fighting game players enough juice to keep them coming back.
What rubs me the wrong way is Miller’s ultimate dismissal of his time at Riot, even inadvertently belittling the hard work of his peers with the following quote: “I was primarily there to learn that ‘how to make a cracked fighting game’ part, and treated my ten years there as the equivalent of a PhD program in fighting game development where the game itself was less important to me than the knowledge I unlocked from the work.”
2XKO will not go anywhere, and it’ll still get two more Champions, Lux and Samira, to close out the year. But it does make you wonder: if the dev team had found a way to implement necessary compromises to help the game get better footing during the most critical period a free-to-play title needs to nail to really nurture a consistent player base, how far could it have evolved?
Maybe, just maybe, you do need that boring foundation to get players through the door before you cut them loose.
And that’s it. Stick with us at Gfinityesports.com: your go-to source for all things 2XKO.