This week I’ve seen twenty reasons why 2XKO flopped and somehow all of them are right, which is kind of irritating because telling people they’re wrong is my favourite thing to do. A fuck-up this colossal surely has plenty of lessons inside it, but apparently everyone involved thinks they did a great job and everyone adjacent is trying their best not to perform any quizzical looks in front of them. Cowards. It wasn’t the faceless corporation that subjected me to reading Thank you, 2XKO.
Here we have a 2XKO “Game Designer + Senior Producer (2016–2026)”, a dream job if I’ve ever heard one, giving us a little insight into what the hell happened, seven months after he himself was victim to the first round of layoffs. “[I] 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.” What intrigue! Such a wealth of knowledge offered up to little ol’ me for the small small price of having to suffer his prose. Fear not, I’ve suffered it for you. All that’s there is a man without eyeballs wishing he had made a painting.
The first refuge of a weasel is making other people shoulder his burdens. “My job is to figure out how to make an awesome fighting game, making it profitable is someone else’s job.” The second is acting like whatever harm was caused wasn’t such a big deal. “The worst thing that happens is that we all get fired.” You promised me a dissertation! Where is it?
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. If by some chance you get to take the shot like this, take the fucking shot.
Such a noble little artist. We don’t care about making Good Product; we only care about making Good Art. Roll the applause. Well, let’s grant this. We have our ten-year sinecure from Riot secured by empty promises that somehow survive our overt contempt for the patron. What do we get out of it? What did we learn? Paraphrasing these 4,000 words, roughly nothing: “Take risks. Preferably with other people’s money.” Thanks, I read that on LinkedIn too.
But perhaps the dissertation is not yet written and I have to study the art itself. Can it survive the viva voce? Unfortunately for Pat, I have eyeballs and all his work says is: We’re gonna make Marvel vs. Capcom with Arcane characters and no motion inputs. I wish I were joking. I wish I had something clever to write, but that’s all there is. The only original thing about it is the clearly ridiculous duos mode. I can’t find a single good idea anywhere, a single bit of insight you’d expect from ten hours of a PhD program, let alone ten years. It’s the only fighting game I’ve studied and learnt nothing from—other than the meaning of kitsch. Even Rising Thunder’s “We’re gonna make Street Fighter for babies” was less creatively hollow.
Maybe you disagree. 2XKO is your darling and you’re gonna play it for decades. I laud your passion. If only we all could offer such love to stillborn babies. The father, it seems, has no such interest. “I’ve only played a couple sets since the layoff – after playing the game for work for ten years, playing the game as a player just feels like I’m giving Riot a freebie.” Pat spent ten years of his life crafting this perfect little museum piece made just for him and he isn’t even interested in visiting the gallery. Perhaps this is unfair—he really is just that bitter towards the curator—but if you have an artistic bone in your body you should see that the feeling he’s expressing is not contempt or disgust but shame, and the way you can tell is that contempt and disgust would be a lot more fun to read.
I’ve created plenty of things I’m ashamed of, but I have the decency not to write about them. Pat has no such honour, because like many others from the post-arcade pre-online generation of American FGC blowhards he refuses to grow up and get a job outside his hobbies and this writing gig is his attempt to find another income stream. Maybe that’s why he pisses me off so much. Stepping on my turf with this airport book soliloquy? A professional writer for twenty-odd years and every word on the page makes me want to staple a rake to my spine just so I can stay awake. I read and write for sport so to see such lazy use of words all for the sake of a dollar? I’m offended. Kidding. He’s lucky I know he’s trying his best.
It’s no surprise he thinks “the ‘product’ lens is flawed for discussing FGs” because part of graduating to adulthood is admitting you can’t go through life forever burning other people’s money so it might be a good idea to spend at least five minutes thinking about the customer. I promise you it won’t kill you. You don’t even have to do the boring stuff yourself when there’s 160 other people on payroll. “There isn’t much that I regret, and certainly nothing that would have changed the course of the game.” Ten years and no big regrets? I thought we were taking risks. “There is an alternative future where the game was financially stable and utterly devoid of sauce […] and that outcome is far more depressing to me than this one.” Sauce, where? Can I try some? Preferably not from a twenty-year-old bottle plucked out of a minifridge in Capcom’s basement. “I probably would have just quit after launch anyway.”
I’m sure you can tell by my citing a five-month-old Twitter spat that I’m a little bit jealous. Ten years of hands-off creative freedom, infinite money glitch, and no corporate oversight, all so he could make whatever fighting game he wanted. And this is what he did with it. He could at least have the decency to say thank you to Riot for funding his overripe adolescence. That he instead has the audacity to be bitter—bitter of all things!—because the glitch got patched is a harsh reminder that envy never looks inward. Sadly, there’s little else to be learnt. The peanut gallery’s twenty reasons are the same ones everyone already knew.
That’s the eulogy, but it makes me wonder how the story started. How did this troupe of bandits land the gig and swindle Riot for ten years straight? What were they saying back then? I wasn’t around at the time, so I have to research this. History has a habit of being more embarrassing than you remember.
If you wake up tomorrow morning, stare at yourself in the mirror, and think, “Self, how can I most efficiently grow the fighting game community?”, here’s the answer.
It isn’t to become a pro player, nor a streamer, TO, sponsor, or any of those other things – even though each of those roles are important and do work to grow the community.
It’s to make a fighting game that will make you money as people keep playing – whether that’s by subscription, or microtransactions, or whatever other crazy business idea you come up with.
—pattheflip, Re: Growing the FGC (2014)
The most daring visible thesis in his 2014–2016 output is that the F2P business model is clearly the best way to grow the scene. Turns out the pitch really was just “F2P + rollback netcode + Street Fighter for babies.” And they didn’t even deliver on that last one. It seems “give the game away for free” wasn’t quite the business insight he thought it’d be.
Dr. Flip, despite not viewing the game as a product, only ever did work on precisely that. “Senior Producer” is on the résumé, and although he called himself a game designer, “I learned how to take animations, wire them up in Unreal to get the character to do things” and a year later “switching over to work on some early exploration on meta-game systems (social, progression, competitive, that kind of thing)”. He was of course in the room with the people working on the core battle systems; he just has nothing to say about that. Around 2020 he was elevated to “Producer/PO of Core Gameplay” where “It is a producer’s job to make sure the game gets made.” I think I get it now. He got the gig from being community manager for Rising Thunder and editor-in-chief for League of Legends. He’s a people guy, not an artist or systems analyst. Explains the shame: he aspires to the latter two while his talents lie elsewhere.
But you know, I think I’m starting to like Pat a bit now. His writing in this period is a lot more pleasant to read for one. It’s shorter; it’s also got that raw optimism of a doe-eyed child who just wants all his friends to get along and be paid to play video games. None of that smarmy faux maturity of a bitter corporate lifer. He proudly bares his sensitive soul and it’d mean the world to him if it could make everyone a little bit gentler. But then I must raise an eyebrow at his crusades against the likes of Mike Z. Is this kindness only ever extended to people at their best? I suppose a child like this quickly learns that gentleness is vulnerable and you have to draw the line somewhere. The measure of such a character is how he treats his friends and family, and by all accounts his cherish him. (Then again, those accounts are all his.) Almost makes me feel bad for treating him like a combatant. In my defence, the pointy end of a bayonet is just as sharp regardless of who wields it. I didn’t make the child a soldier.
So how did this community manager become Senior Producer for the all-time biggest fighting game flop? Who’s to blame for turning young Pat with the infectious smile into this insufferable bore?
Due to some key staff exits, we were understaffed on production, and so Tom asked me to fill in for a bit to lead Core Gameplay while we hired a deeper bench. […] This was right around the time that we brought Clockw0rk on the team and started investigating the possibility of pivoting the gameplay towards a tag fighter.
Now I’m intrigued. Did that pivot cause the exits? Was he set up as the fall guy? He seems repelled by roles that make any decisions. Even so, these things get decided as a team, so the people guy is highly suspect.
The other side of the job was recruiting and training up a bunch of fighting game players with mostly little-to-no game development experience […] This is how we got Yohosie, NerdJosh, ApologyMan, Funtaxx, and GCYoshi on the team, and guiding them through the process of becoming true game development professionals is still one of my proudest career accomplishments to date.
Here’s the timeline I can see. Seth Killian, Chief Creative Officer for Rising Thunder before the acquisition, leaves his Lead Designer role with Riot in 2019. Clockw0rk joins and they pivot. Pat promotes to producer to fill a vacancy then self-demotes to enable the pivot with a bunch of consultants. This is actually a decent move. The GAT role suits his talents better and has a humility to it absent in today’s writing. He knew he was out of his depth so he asked for help. Too bad consulting competitive players for game design advice is like asking a child what they want for dinner. Nine times out of ten, it’s chicken nuggets with tomato sauce. I won’t deny there’s a market for that, but it’s already saturated and those kids won’t switch brands. And all you end up making is chicken nuggets with tomato sauce.
Everywhere I look, Pat makes the right moves in the wrong direction. I guess that’s the best you can hope for when you don’t have eyeballs. He calls himself a sage. I suppose even a blind and lousy one has his place. It just isn’t in the war room. Hopefully he enjoys the retirement.