John Ricchio is a veteran game producer whose career spans leadership roles on major AAA blockbusters at Rockstar Games (GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3) and Riot Games.
The competitive scene was shocked when Riot Games announced major layoffs on 2XKO, its upcoming 2v2 fighting game set in the League of Legends universe. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Thunderpick, former Riot producer John Ricchio revealed that roughly 82 developers were let go shortly after the console launch despite strong acclaim from fighting game pros. Ultimately, fighting games remained a tight addressable market, and player numbers did not justify maintaining a 160-person dev team.
Beyond team restructuring, Ricchio lifted the lid on how in-game leaks happen, explaining that most unreleased champions or stages slip into test builds due to simple user errors in data registries. While developers dread seeing unfinished work exposed, broader marketing teams sometimes welcome leaks to shift negative news cycles or generate hype when official beats are lacking.
Reflecting on multiplayer system design, Ricchio shared how Red Dead Redemption handled systemic exploits without issuing mass bans. By creating a dedicated “cheater jail” matchmaking pool, developers kept exploiters playing together where expectations matched, preserving the player base while protecting the standard multiplayer experience for everyone else.
Looking at the broader state of the industry, Ricchio warned that the traditional entry pathway for aspiring developers is fundamentally broken. Relying solely on a game design degree is no longer enough to clear initial recruitment filters, with breaking into the industry now requiring portfolio projects, UGC creation and demonstrating capability without waiting for gatekeepers.
Key Takeaways
- 2XKO suffered from attempting to capture a broad audience within fighting games, which remain a tough, small addressable market to monetise at a massive AAA team scale.
- Despite strong critical acclaim from fighting game pros and solid dev responsiveness, player numbers and revenue on 2XKO did not justify maintaining a 160-person dev team.
- Most fighting game and hero leaks happen when unreleased assets are not properly tagged in data registries, accidentally pushing them into public test builds.
- Rather than banning dedicated players exploiting multiplayer systems in Red Dead Redemption, developers created isolated matchmaking pools for cheaters to play against each other.
- A degree in game design is no longer enough to land a job; building portfolio projects, modding, making UGC and bypassing traditional gatekeepers is now required.
Full Interview with John Ricchio
Are project management and producer roles fading in game development, or are leadership expectations simply shifting?
It’s tough because the producer role has long been an overloaded term, so you find this out as a producer anytime you’re talking with somebody and they’ve had a bad experience with a producer and then they describe what that producer did. I’m like, “That’s none of what I do.” So I think your mileage may vary based on where you’re at and what type of company you’re at.
But I do think that there is somewhat of an expectation that a lot of the particularly entry-level producer tasks can be done quickly by lead production people using AI or other tools that are now available and ubiquitous. I do think that impacts the number of roles.
I think in general lower-level roles, production included, are really in a challenging spot right now because companies have decided that a lot of that stuff is better automated, and I don’t think they’ve really thought through the problem of where did tomorrow’s mid and senior people come from if we’re going to offload all this stuff to technology or automation. Who’s growing these people? What do we use to get them experience and understanding? And so, I think for me that’s the biggest change that I’ve seen is that there’s less of an appetite to hire people to grow them into more advanced people or senior, more experienced people.
But yeah, I think it’s easy to think of that piece as just rote and mechanical. And I think, if you’re in maybe traditional software for a company that’s building something that’s very well understood, that can be true. I think games are rarely that. And I think the more you try and make games into very deterministic, predictable things, the less fun they are to play. So I do think there’s a piece there where this quest for efficiency tends to be in conflict with effectiveness. Our job is to make art that is amazing for people to play. Yes, there’s a lot of technology. Yes, there’s a lot of work and corporate-type stuff to get that done. But the whole point is to make someone feel something on the other end. And when we get too caught up in the efficiency of it, I think we lose sight of that and it makes it really easy to run into problems.
And that’s kind of what I feel like with this project management on a game or any creative project is just different. It’s a lot of soft skills. It’s a lot of reaching out to people and how do we figure out connecting dots that maybe don’t obviously make sense to someone who is looking across the whole project. Stuff like that. And I don’t think that’s easily automatable, or it’s not an easy thing to throw on somebody that’s already busy, like a senior or a lead. And so for me, I would much rather see… and I really benefited from being an associate and just volunteering to do busy work. “No one wants to do this report? I’ll do it,” and then I’ll figure out how to automate it. Especially those of us in production who came through QA, I think that’s our story. It’s just like, hey, we volunteered for stuff and we just keep volunteering and trying stuff.
And if those opportunities aren’t there, I really do worry about what the future looks like for the craft because where are people going to come from? Side projects outside of a job. But I still think there’s a lot of value in having junior and mid people around to learn the ropes of how to do project management and how to do that stuff in a real practical setting, in a setting that is challenging, as creative projects are. And I worry that we’re going to lose out on that a little bit.
Do hiring managers actually care about developing junior talent, or are basic skills all they look for?
I think there’s two things there. The basics, I think, is almost never enough in games. There are very few areas where you can do just the bare minimum and have it work out over the course of a project, right? It just doesn’t work that way. There’s so many unknowns and so much… I think the reason why agile is generally successful in creative projects, especially, even though it was designed purely for software projects, is that stuff changes and it’s really helpful to check in with “future us” to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.
The other part is I think recruiting is really being blown up. And I think if it is very real that at that level there’s two things: one, they probably don’t have a lot of capacity to think deeply into, “Hey, we should grow these people,” unless it’s being dictated through the organisation; and then the other part is I don’t think it’s very difficult to articulate your value to a discipline like recruiting that is so impacted by so many people looking for work at the same time, downward pressure from people that are working having to take lower roles because there’s not any senior roles. Like, all of that kind of contributes. I think it’s really difficult to show your value in that context, so I think it really does take someone in the organisation to say, “Hey, I get it, like there’s lots of people, but we’re making a leadership decision to start growing people for our company or for the industry at large.”
And I think you’re right. Some places don’t care about that. And I think don’t feel like they can care about that because money’s too tight or things are too tight. So I do think there’s reality there, but I don’t think it changes the reality of the short-term nature of those decisions, right? I think historically there’s always been a place for people to learn and I think project management is one of those great things to learn early as a producer. That you don’t have to know a lot of stakeholder management; you can confine it to a fairly contained project, you can work on having one or two stakeholders, having one or two teams that you’re working with to get things done. Like, it’s really useful for the studio and it’s self-contained so it’s not too difficult to have someone that maybe doesn’t know everything how they do it, and if they make mistakes, it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t think we get away from that value of that, right? And using that to help grow people.
I could be wrong. We could find out later that the new entry level is someone that drives AI really well and that’s what they do. And then if they want to become senior, they learn those other skills later. That could be the model. But for me, I just feel like there’s a lot of value being left on the table and a lot of future value being left on the table because those people just are going to have a really hard time getting through that recruiting layer because on paper, what do you say? “I’m just starting,” or, “I’m very, very low experience.” How do I prove this to you without being there?
Is now a realistic time to break into the games industry?
I think it’s tough. I’ve had this conversation. So, one of the things I’ve done is I basically just put an open call out to LinkedIn and to Amir Satvat’s mentoring thing. I put it out there: “Hey, look, if anyone wants to talk, let’s talk.” And so I’ve talked to a number of people from people that have been in the industry for a really long time, people that are just graduating with a master’s of computer science; I’m really lucky to talk to a big wide range of people.
And I’ll tell you, the people that I think are best positioned are the ones that are coming from hey, I made a bunch of UGC, I’ve done all these side projects. I think that is the new entry level is to do a bunch of work that you can do take advantage of the fact that there are a lot of things you can do in games that don’t require gatekeepers and do that. I think I’m much more nervous for the people that are coming out with advanced degrees in game development or whatever, because where are you going to get your experience?
No one’s looking for those folks right now and I think it’s really challenging and so my suggestion to all those folks has been start building things with people as much as you can don’t put yourself in jeopardy figure out how you got to make your living but start making things with people and then start talking about it on socials so that you can actually have a presence getting a role at these places because I believe the entry level pathway is broken. I really do. I think it is broken and I think recruiting is part of it but I also think there’s some leadership side of not placing the value on it like I said earlier.
So it would be tough. I literally just had a talk with one of my best friends about his daughter who’s an aspiring 3D artist, trying to make it happen. And he’s like, “Dude, should she just not try?” And I’m like, “If she’s super into it, it’s still worth pursuing because there is work to be done for sure. But I think you need to go in with eyes wide open. You can’t go in thinking if I just keep applying, it’ll work.” I don’t think that pathway works. I think it’s broken. So you need to be kind of strategic about it and how you approach it.
I think networking matters a lot more which is also challenging for young folks and I think demonstrating removing the need for gatekeepers like my experience I have five years of experience it’s all in side projects or game jams and for me as an employer I would be much more confident in that person’s capabilities seeing their work and having it done as opposed to hey I just got a degree which historically maybe wouldn’t have been that big of a deal because you have jobs and roles for people that are just starting out.
But now you almost have to show… It’s like the meme, where people are like, it’s an entry-level role, but you need five years of experience. It’s like, how the hell does that happen, right? So need to acknowledge that reality: it’s not our fault that the industry is in this place, but it’s still our responsibility to figure out how to navigate it.
And so I think when you’re in that position as someone that is trying to get in, deciding whether or not do you want to make games before you get hired on a game company, I think is the big question. And if you answer yes, then start doing it and then you can keep looking while you’re doing other things. I don’t think that ‘I want to go into games, I’m just going to start applying’ is valid anymore. I just think it’ll be really difficult. And I think it matters what you can show you’ve already done because without that you’re just lost in the sauce. There are so many qualified people out there right now. It’s just really tough.
Would contract work tied to project cycles be a better employment model for game dev studios than permanent roles?
It’s tough. So, I’m definitely not a business expert, but I have seen quite a bit of noise about generally people from outside the industry going, “Why don’t you just do it like movies?” They all come together… all a bunch of creative people come together, they’re all kind of freelancers, they work for smaller companies, they work on a big project, and then they all leave. That is a model that can work.
I can tell you, having experienced: the game came out, didn’t do so well, you get laid off. It feels terrible. Part of why it feels terrible is because that’s not what I thought I was signing up for. So I think if a company decided, “Hey, for this game we are going to approach it this way and we’re going to have an alternate model. We’re going to keep our kind of long-term opex low but we’re going to… because we’re not going to have a huge staff.
We’re not going to have huge buildings, but we’re going to try and build this project and then we’re going to let people go, but we’re letting people know up front so they can plan their exit.” They can do all that stuff. I think that’s much more humane than what we’re seeing right now where… I thought I had a job at Riot. I was so excited, and then I was there for seven months on a project that was basically rushing to ship. So I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to do a lot and then the game didn’t do super well. So I’m like, “My god.” That was not at all what I was expecting. So I think it’s that expectation difference.
I do think that we’ll start seeing something similar to that. Someone’s going to try to do that model in response to this crazy wave of layoffs over the last few years, but I don’t know how that will affect the front end.
If you start telling game devs, “Hey, look, we’re not going to staff, we’re not going to keep a large team together,” I think a lot of people will decide to leave the industry. I don’t know if it’ll be everybody and I don’t know if it’ll kill games, but I do think there’ll be certain people like, “Hey, that doesn’t work for me. That’s too much risk. I’m nervous.” And I know some people that have worked in… I used to work for James Cameron as an AP back in the day… and the gig-kind-of-vibe is hard. It’s not an easy way of life, especially if you have people depending on you. It’s tricky. So I do worry about that.
The part that I think we lose if we go that way, and the reason why I am an advocate for maintaining a team particularly between projects, is you learn so much and you solve so much through the course of making a project, right?
The example I always use is it was really difficult to get the first Red Dead Redemption out. Like, we got it out and it took us a long time, but we got it out. It did really well. It took us from Josh Needleman, one of the producers in New York, going, “Hey, we should make an Undead thing for Halloween,” to delivering Undead Nightmare was literally eight months total. It was crazy. And we had, I want to say, 15 designers and a couple of engineers. And then we had a bunch of cutscene people and stuff in New York. But the actual dev team was really small because everyone knew what they had to do. All the tools worked, the pipeline worked, and I just feel like there’s some magic that you pay a lot of resources and time to create in the team that, when you get rid of them, you kind of throw it away. You paid the cost to build kind of this magical resilience and the difficult parts of getting people to pull together instead of pulling apart when things get hard. That’s real work and it takes time and it’s hard, and then to just throw it away just feels rough.
It’d be like a sports team… “Hey, we win the championship and let’s throw everybody away and start again. We’ll redraft from the start.” You’d be like, “I don’t know if that’s the best way to do this.” So, like I said, I don’t claim to know the right thing from a business standpoint, but from being one of the people on the team, I have seen so much value in being able to keep a team together and deliver. And you’re not going to keep everybody, but keeping a core group of people together, keeping a culture together, and really trying to kind of support that… you can do really great things without having to pay that storming, forming, norming cost every single time, right? And so that’s the part that I worry about.
I do see where people are coming from with, “Hey, it’s a creative project just like movies. You should do it like movies.” I see where they’re coming from. I just worry that we lose a lot of what makes the great studios that we think of, great. A lot of times it’s because they keep a core group of people together and they’re able to just keep building on top of it rather than starting from scratch every time. So yeah. So that’s kind of where I feel.
What happens to studio identity when key veteran developers leave or get laid off?
I think it comes then there’s a lot of what happens if you think of the old studio model for movies, that’s kind of what games… it is the studio is what matters. And there’s been a push for a long time to value the individuals more, and I understand that and I think, the movements to try and make conditions better and, kind of get things to where people are an important part of it and I think some studios do a really good job of sharing who’s making the games and why those people are awesome.
But it would make that really difficult, right? It would basically be: okay, who was the creative director or who was the lead designer? I want to follow them wherever they go. And so, it turns into a different model where you hope, but then you’re still at the thing. Can that creative director or executive producer, can they get the same type of team together again? Is it a guarantee that it’s going to be as good, right? You don’t know.
I think that’s the part where the cost that you’re paying to kind of maintain a team, which is real cost … salaries and people are a huge percentage of the cost of making games. And I think that’s where it should be. You want to pay really great people to do really good work, and you want to reward them when they do good work, but it’s real cost. And so, my opinion is that the cost is what you’re paying for is that consistency, that ability to say, “Hey, we can do this again.” And I think we’ve seen it.
It’s not a guarantee, but we’ve seen these studios that we love, that do games that you like, I know I’m going to love. Back in the day when Infinity Ward was making the Call of Duties, I always remember being like, “Dude, if it’s an Infinity Ward game, I’m in.” And it took Treyarch a while to get up to that thing where, yeah, Treyarch is legitimately doing amazing stuff. I think it’s a real phenomenon that we’ve seen. It’s not notional; keeping teams together has value.
I think what it would take is if someone wanted to do… because I couldn’t think of a production company that makes maybe some movies. You think of certain production companies that are like, “Yeah, they usually do…” My wife loves horror movies and she’s like, “I like Blumhouse,” or I like a certain production company. But I don’t generally think of movies that way, right? It’s just like the project. So I think it would be a different model. And maybe it could succeed, but I think it will take someone doing that model, making a really great game, and then people going, “Shit, I guess it is possible.” But I would think that’d be a really hard transition.
Do senior studio executives actually play and understand the games they greenlight?
I think it depends on the company. I’ve heard stories from really big game companies where they’re not involved at all and then a lot of times they’ll decide to be involved late and that causes a lot of problems.
I can tell you at Rockstar, like Sam Houser, Dan, they definitely are involved. They want to play the game. They want to make sure it hits the vibe they want, and there are trade-offs, right? Having that level of involvement from senior executives has trade-offs, but there’s no argument that they care about what goes out and what goes through.
So I think there are different ways to do it, even on successful games, right? But I think the real risk comes in is if senior leadership doesn’t get involved or doesn’t know about things until much later and there’s already a lot of decisions that have been made and a lot of development that’s been done. They can really wreak havoc by coming in late and then asking for pivots because they don’t have quite as much as clear of an understanding of the cost of that but they have all the power to do so right?
The senior leaders always retain the right to make decisions for the business; that’s their job. They have to be able to do that, but the cost of that, I think, is often not clear to them, either because it doesn’t feel safe to tell them, “Hey, I know you want to do this, but here’s the cost,” or people just want to make them happy, and so they go, “Yeah, yeah, whatever you want,” and then we’ll do it.
But the real cost comes out on the dev team at least, and a lot of times, you can see it in the final product because the team didn’t have as much time to adjust to the pivot or whatever.
So, I do think there are senior execs that do it in a way that ensures that they are on board, but to not know that you greenlighted Kingdom Hearts is hilarious and speaks to it.
I do think that that type of thinking is very accurate, though, with shareholders. I don’t think shareholders paid super close attention; I think they’re looking at it from a way different lens. They’re looking at to extract value for their investment. And I do think that, in a lot of ways, that’s antithetical to the artistic journey that is often making a really good game. You do need people to extend you faith. You do need people to give you a chance to finish games so that your team can kind of coalesce, and then maybe the next game is better. I think those are things that really benefit the end product, that this model of needing to deliver near-term or midterm shareholder value makes it really tough.
But at the same time, a lot of games wouldn’t get made because without that money from investors and stakeholders, right? So it’s tough. Is it better to have less games get made that use this money in order to kind of insulate us from that type of thinking? I don’t think it will erase it if we did less kind of venture funding and stuff, but it puts the focus back on where I would love it to be, which is on how does our art make people feel, and then trying to do that in a way, and monetise it and make businesses around that that don’t feel yucky.
I think that’s a real important thing to me, but it’s clearly not the only way to do business, and so, it’s tough to speak on how things should be, but I do think it contributes. I don’t think that you get to the situations where so many companies are just either axing projects or axing people just because they’re like, “This makes our earnings call look terrible.” I think it is a contributor to that kind of decision-making, and I don’t think that decision-making always aligns with making the best games.
How real is the risk of a wider games industry crash?
Yeah, I think there’s a number of things. So around COVID, I do think that it’s possible for certain companies to be able to live with those COVID bets longer than others, which could cause them to hit the layoff point later than others. So I do think that is a thing that can happen where they overstaff and they try and make it work for as long as they can and then they realise they can’t, and so that goes through… and that for some people that’s two years, for some people that’s five years, whatever.
So I do think that’s part of it, but I do think that it’s unlikely that the game industry will fail, like it will fall over and no games will be made and people won’t be doing it. I do think that we’ll be at risk of not seeing as many really good creative large productions because those incur risk, and risk and shareholder value are not sympathetic, right? Thankfully, as we saw with Clair Obscur and other kind of double-A type games, there is still a way to deliver really good value and really good production at smaller scales or lower budgets. So that will still fill the gap.
But then obviously, when you get down to really small indie stuff, there’s still a ton of access to make games, and you can get Super Meat Boy and Vampire Survivors and these little games that just do amazingly well because they’re really cool. So, I think that’ll still happen. So I don’t think the industry will collapse.
But it’s many of the same… how long before we get Call of Duty 27? And I don’t know how many of those can the industry weather before people decide to stop funding that type of business model. I think some people would consider that a collapse if VC is just like, “No, we’re not doing it anymore.”
But I don’t think that would mean games would go away. And I still think that there would be people that will make great things on smaller teams. And, in some ways, maybe that’s like a healthy reset, in some ways, to kind of get an idea. And I think the most likely outcome would be, though, is that there’ll be some subset of really big studios that are able to work within this publicly owned shareholder model, and the games they make and their fanbase is all on board with that.
I do think we’ll see a growth of kind of like the publisher that can kind of get success with a number of development studios. I think that’s going to grow. But I really don’t think there’ll be a collapse. I think the collapse is going to be felt by the people that work in the industry. There’s just not nearly any jobs. I think right now the last time Amir Satvat put out some stats on the layoffs, they are disproportionately hitting the West. So North America is 70-some per cent of the layoffs, right? Whereas other parts of the industry overall is growing.
Folks that we were using for outsourcing have learned how the process works and are now building really successful studios and being able to do things. So it’s not so much that the industry is struggling to grow as a business. It’s that the people that are part of it are in a situation where they’re really feeling the brunt of the shift of the business kind of globally versus being really centred in the West. That feels horrible, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the end of the industry. The industry doesn’t care about our feelings. The industry is trying to make money for people and make really good products and deliver value. So it is agnostic to my suffering.
So yeah, so I don’t think there’s a risk of the industry collapsing. Entertainment is always valuable. Games are the best form of entertainment, short of maybe sitting around a table with people playing board games or other kind of games, but video games are just so hard to beat. They are just some of my favourite things to do in the world. So, I don’t think they’re going to go anywhere. I think that what it will look like will change.
I would love us to land closer to a place where more companies are able to focus on making really great experiences that make people feel really, really strong feelings than we have now. I feel like we’ve overindexed towards the business side. Feels bad for a lot of people, players included.
How did you track and prevent in-game leaks on 2XKO, and do publishers ever leak on purpose?
Yeah. So, my part was the in-game leak. So, the main problem was something may become scheduled for Q3, but we’re working on it in Q1. So it’s got to be in the build. We’ve got to be able to test it, and there are all kinds of things like that. So there are a few different vectors that can happen where things get into builds when maybe they shouldn’t be, and those builds go out publicly or go out for testing or whatever, and then someone sees it, and then they’re able to leak it publicly. So that was my side of things, and then when things happened, the Riot operations centre would spin up an incident, and we would have to go in and try and figure out what happened. What mitigation do we have to do? And then how do we block the leak going forward? So, mostly it was trying to make sure that we weren’t including things even though there were technical systems to prevent things from going in.
User error made it really easy to allow things to kind of slip in. They weren’t marked up exactly right in the data registry, and so they would show up in builds that they shouldn’t be. And so that’s one of the vectors.
And then that’s where you get a lot of those “here’s a screenshot from some unreleased champion”, or “here’s a stage that wasn’t supposed to be in there.” And almost always it was just a simple user error that went in, and so we’d find it, we’d close the leak, and then we’d try and make it easier on the tools to not make that mistake.
But there are some as well where it’s just like, hey, someone had access and couldn’t resist sharing this cool new thing. I think that is just a human thing when you deal with really large projects all over the world. You hit someone that is just so excited they can’t resist or, maybe it’s innocuous; they take a picture of it because they just want to have it personally, someone sees it, whatever. There’s all kinds of reasons, but yeah, so that was the main thing was making sure that we didn’t leak things through builds. And so, there were, as we went through the release process, just various gates where we had to confirm there were no leaks in there.
Regarding intentional leaks, I don’t have any evidence. Yeah, I’ve never seen it, but it does not surprise me at all. Because if you think about it, the people that genuinely get upset about leaks are the dev team. An artist, something goes out early and it’s not done, they’re like, “Dude, like that thing’s not done. I was really working hard to make it great before people saw it.” The dev team’s not out here leaking things on purpose, but I can easily see some part of the edifice that supports games that is like, “Hey, maybe there’s a story that we’re trying to overrun with something else. We want to distract from a negative story and we’ll leak this and that’ll be something positive. Or hey, we don’t have a marketing beat for right now.” I could totally see that.
And I think if it doesn’t hurt the people that made the thing… if they don’t feel terrible about it and they don’t feel like their work was not appreciated or wasted or they get a critique on something that’s not even done, as long as that’s not the case, who cares? Publicity is publicity. If people get excited about it, and most of the people that are leaking this stuff are engaging with that content, they really love the game, they love the company. So, it’s not like they’re trying to do anything bad with it, usually.
I think there’s a limit on how much we should care about those. And I think that it’s smart as a gamer to be suspicious. But like I said, I’ve never been in any of those calls. I’ve mostly been on the dev side, and the feeling from the dev side is always, “Damn, dude, the next version of that is so much better. Why did they have to leak that thing? Why did that one get out?” That’s usually what the feeling is on the dev side. It’s never—no one on the dev team is saying, “Hey, could you show my work before I’m done?” Like, no one wants that.
How did the 2XKO layoffs unfold internally after launch?
Yeah. There’s about 82 of us that got let go. So the feeling… the notice was not there. I started to notice because I’ve been in the industry a long time. I started to notice the people above me were acting differently and I started to get frustrated. And so I was like, “Hey, what is going on?” And I found out that they had gotten a little bit of a heads-up so that they could help generate the list of people that needed to stay so that the game could continue.
So some people learn earlier than others. But it still felt sudden to a lot of us as well, especially… I’d only been there a few… some of the people, we’d only been there seven months. And so we were thinking this is our first project at Riot, we got lots of other things we’re going to work on.
To set some context for 2XKO, it was a big bet. It’s a very small addressable market, fighting games in general, and we were trying to capture a portion of that market, which… we had great people; the Cannon brothers and a lot of people on the team were really deep into the fighting game arena. They’re really good, knowledgeable people that I don’t think I’ve ever worked with any group of people on a game that we had more expertise on the type of game we were making. They knew the people, they cared a lot about the fans, and they really wanted it to be good for pros and for people. The bet was that they were going to be able to capture some segment of the hardcore population and, through the IP pull people over into fighting games, at least this Riot fighting game, because, “Hey, you get to play the champ that you play in League or that you play in other.” We’re trying to kind of blend those together and that combination would be enough to sustain the business, but it’s still a really small market to try and attack. So, there’s a risk.
To their credit, they committed to making it happen and they got it done. I think what they realised as we got closer was that there wasn’t enough success on 2XKO. There weren’t enough people playing. There weren’t enough people buying things to sustain the full size of the team. Then they had to decide who was necessary to keep the team afloat in this new era where we know this big bet didn’t wholly pay off and we’re trying to kind of still keep the business going.
Did 2XKO’s long development timeline factor into the layoff decisions?
Could be. I mean, it depends. There are so many factors, right? I’m sure for that whole 10 years there wasn’t 160 people, right? So I’m sure that there were fewer people, so that cost over time… But I think it is a factor 100% when you think about sunk costs, “Hey, look, like, we’ve already sunk all this money in here, does it make sense to keep throwing money at this or does it make sense to make a hard decision and go through?” I think that it’s certainly a part of the equation.
I think the part that was confusing to me as a dev was that I showed up seven months essentially before I got laid off, so all those decisions had already been made, and I was under the understanding that we had a little bit of a runway to kind of make it go. So something changed. Whether that was financials at the high level and this became the best place for them to make cuts, and so something changed. Like, that runway no longer made sense because of other things that happened in other places in the company.
I know they shared a lot of the metrics with us and the performance stuff. It felt like… It didn’t surprise me, what we were seeing. We have some people that don’t like it. But one of our things that we were really good about doing, even in the very short time, was that we were listening to people and we were making changes. And that’s really uncommon, I guess, with fighting game companies. They very rarely change things because it has many implications, right, on the competitive scene and all that stuff. So, one of our differentiators was that conversation with players and being able to change it. And I’m sure they’re still doing that now. And I think what happened is they just didn’t think that they needed that size of a team to do that. And so to them, maybe they do have their runway. They’re not cancelling the game. They just cancelled us. They’re probably still going, but they just felt like that ramp at that cost was too much. And so they decided to go without it.
I couldn’t list out all 82 of us and say, “Hey, here’s why you should have kept all of us.” Maybe it made sense, I don’t know. But I do feel like that team was just starting to get to the point where we could start really operationalising a lot of stuff because getting to console launch was so much about doing things for a first time. We’re setting this up first time; we really never got a chance to really kind of get into a rhythm of, “Okay, now we’re repeating stuff. We’re making small adjustments, but we essentially know how things work.” I feel like we could have done some really cool things with that, but, like I said, the business decided otherwise. And unfortunately, the devs are the ones who always foot that bill. Unfortunately, just how it goes.
How do you balance player feedback with design intent, and have you ever seen a player-led change backfire?
So one thing is, yes, that is 100% true. Like, you should never ignore customer pain or player pain, because it is real to them; they are experiencing it. And so listening to it, making people feel heard, and then acting on it in a way, or at least deciding what you’re going to do about it, I think is important. Even if it’s like, “Hey, we hear you. This is it. Other things we think are higher priority. We’re going to put this on the backlog. Here’s roughly when we’re going to revive.” I think that’s totally fine. Or even, “Look, we made a design choice in this game to not do it that way, and so we’re not going to make that change.” All of that is okay.
The key point there is not to do what players want, necessarily. It’s to listen to them and to let them know that engaging with you is something that is productive and valuable, because that’ll lead to things that inevitably you will action on.
But if you ignore them, people stop saying anything valuable. They just start complaining. And then if you do everything they say, then you just get thrashed around and there’s no guarantee, and it devalues the expertise that you have in-house. So you’ve got brilliant designers and a lot of these really smart people that are solving these problems and thinking deeply about these systems before they ever go out to players.
I think the right model is always to listen to them, acknowledge the signal that you’re getting from players, look for patterns. I think the most brilliant analytics and insights people and designers in some cases are the ones that look across wide swaths of complaints and feedback and they’re like, “All of this points to this thing that doesn’t seem like it makes sense, but goes through.”
In Red Dead Redemption multiplayer, we found there were a few places where you could exploit, right? You could basically get to a place where no one could get to you, and you could throw grenades at them and it wouldn’t work, different things like that.
My initial reaction and a lot of people’s reaction was like, “These players are the problem. We got to get rid of them.” And I was going to our lead multiplayer engineer to tell him, “Dude, we got to get rid of these folks. That’s the solution. The players want these people banned. We got to get rid of them.” And he’s like, “Hold on.” Some of these… we went through some of the names and these people are playing all the time. They’re some of our most dedicated players to the game. And I was like, “But they’re cheating.” He’s like, “Hold on. The actual problem is that they’re impacting other people’s play. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people and they need to go away. It’s just that we need to think about—what is the actual impact and what is this desired experience we want?”
And so he basically implemented like a “cheater jail.” So basically we implemented a way to matchmake people that had been found cheating into the matchmaking together because they clearly want to play the game in a certain way and they wanted things. We still fixed the bugs and the exploits that we knew about. But these types of players are fine playing with other people that are doing the same thing. The problem comes when you take players that expect one thing and you put them with another group of players, and then they start to ruin each other’s time.
So I was like, “That’s such a brilliant…” If we had gone in and done what I wanted, which was to just fix the bug and ban those people, we literally took people that loved our game, demonstrated it by playing it all the time, and would kick them out. It’s like, “No, let them play.” Let’s just make sure that we do what we can as developers to keep them playing with people where the expectations are the same. And I think that’s such a good model for the type of thought you have to take in.
Even in a super obvious situation like, “These players are doing something wrong,” you still really benefit and your players really benefit by taking time to really deeply think about: what is the actual problem we’re trying to solve? What can we do to make everybody that’s playing our game still enjoy it? I think that’s an example of taking a signal from players and using the expertise, experience, and your understanding of the systems that you have to come up with a solution that’s a win for everybody.
So, we didn’t have to ban anybody. We still had to ban some people for other things, but not for that thing. And we created this cheater jail where they got to play together and they were there for a certain amount of time and then they would go back to regular matchmaking, and if they happened again, we’d throw them in a cheater jail again. It was just a really good learning experience for me.
Even after… God, I had been at Rockstar forever, so it wasn’t like I was brand new, but I just didn’t think about it that deeply. I was too willing to jump and do what the players wanted, which was to bring the ban down on these “bad” people. And instead, I had someone who had thought about it more deeply than me help me understand that we could do something that would make things better for everybody. And it solved the problem. And it didn’t lock people out of our game that really loved our game.
What is your final message for developers and players navigating today’s industry?
The only thing I’d want to say is just to other devs out there that are really in a tough spot: I think there’s a lot of us that are going through a really hard time. Because remember, it’s not just games that has been hit. The other software jobs that we would go to have also been hit. Oracle laid off 30,000 people. There are a lot of people out there. So even looking outside of games, I think it’s really difficult.
My encouragement would just be to reach out to people like me or me… don’t be isolated. Don’t isolate yourself. Don’t use this situation to hurt yourself where you say: ‘the reason why I’m looking and the reason why I can’t find a job or no one’s getting back to me is that I’m terrible’ or whatever. The reality is that most of this happened without even considering our work or what we did; it was largely business decisions.
The only thing we can really do is look after each other as best we can. And then just encourage people to keep building stuff with other people. Entry-level folks, I really want to drive that home. I don’t want to ward people away from the game industry, but I do want to change the expectation that the old way is still working, because I don’t think it is. So those are the kind of two things.
And for players: gamers are increasingly discussing revenue, budgets, player counts, profitability, and investor expectations rather than simply blaming the studio or just being sad or whatever they’re feeling. I think there’s a number of people that have genuine affection for people that make games that they love. They’re like, “Man, I love that studio. I can’t believe it’s gone.” All of us feel the same way about studios that have closed that made games.
Games aren’t going away. They’re going to continue. My encouragement would be: spend what you’re able to support the games that you really love, even if that means maybe playing less games. I think that’s the biggest thing you can do for devs.
Even if you like this really weird one-off game, spending the money on that game really sends a clear data point that this resonated with somebody. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but that’s the power that you have as players, as customers, is to vote with your wallet or vote with your time. And that doesn’t mean, if you really love some of those mobile or gacha models where you’re doing stuff, spend your money there.
I think I’m more concerned about games that aren’t set up that way and making sure that you’re supporting them in that way. And if you like a game, let people know, so that you can give these smaller games some visibility. Even with companies contracting and projects getting cancelled, there’s still a lot of games out there, and there’s going to be even more with people putting AI-kind-of-sloppy games out there in some cases. Sometimes, I’m sure there’ll be some good AI games.
If you have a good experience with a piece of art, sharing that and then supporting it with your time and money, I think is such a value to devs Even if we don’t necessarily get to see it directly or get to know, we do—there are a lot of times where people have advocated for us or maybe spoken up in places where we couldn’t speak up, that we see and are super happy about. So yeah, so all I would say is: if you love something, if you really like it, don’t be shy. Share about it, talk about it, and then support it with your time and money. I think that is, to the level that you’re able. I think that’s the value that players give back to us.
It feels so good. It almost doesn’t matter how well critics like your game if you get people that just tell you, “Dude, that game… like, I spent my whole summer playing it. It’s ingrained in my mind.” Really, it’s hard to beat. So, that would be my encouragement.
I think even if it’s older games, some of these folks that have been laid off maybe worked on games that you played a while ago. If you remember some game, sharing those stories and helping those teams- even studios that get cut, that get shut down, being able to read that has an impact on people’s lives, I think can help sustain us as we go through this kind of really tricky time.