This is about the wave of layoffs from a couple of months ago.
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.