2XKO Product Strategy (probably)
Welcome to 2XKO
As a long time fighting game fan, I’m super excited for Riot’s upcoming entrance into this genre. The League of Legends IP has never been stronger and if anyone can pull off a sustainable, well designed live service title it’s Riot. I wanted to sort of reverse engineer the product strategy behind this title using the establish “Strategy Cascade” model found in A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s book Playing to Win. It’s a relatively simply framework, but still powerful in it’s ability to clearly distill the essence of a product/firm’s strategy and how it can find success.
The framework revolves around 5 interrelated questions that guide the strategic planning process:
What is our winning aspiration? - Defines the organization's purpose and vision of success.
Where will we play? - Identifies the markets or segments where the organization will compete.
How will we win? - Outlines the approach to creating a competitive advantage within the chosen markets.
What capabilities must we have? - Specifies the set of capabilities necessary to win in the chosen markets.
What management systems are required? - Determines the systems and measures needed to support the strategy and capabilities.
This cascade ensures that every element of the strategy is aligned and supports the overarching goal of winning. With that, lets dive in.
What is 2XKO’s vision?
2XKO is all about taking established League of Legends characters and placing them in a fresh genre. Players can fall in love with their favorite champions all over again. I think this process takes two forms:
Let’s give champions more than 4 abilities - let’s give them a full move set. This allows characters to express their fighting styles in such a richer way than the typical MOBA approach. That isn’t to say that players can’t express themselves through their characters (e.g look at top tier Yasuo, Riven, Zed play), but it is a much more central part of the fighting game experience.
Let’s allow champions of all roles/lanes to fight. Sure there will be bruisers (Darius) and assassins (Yasuo) but I hope Riot is willing to throw more support champions into the mix that wouldn’t typically fit the fighting game mold. How does Blitzkrank combo off his rocket arm? How could Evelyn use invisibility in a fighting game? Who knows.
The goal ultimately is to make this accessible to League fans and fighting games fans (we’ll get into this later). Accessibility takes many forms such as design, monetization, or even publishing. So we have a high level north star to aim for, that’s great. Let’s look more strategically at where we will play.
Stepping into the arena
This question of “where we will play” can really be subdivided into platform, geography, and customer segements. We’ll start with platform. This is I think one of the easier questions that Riot had to answer when building 2XKO. PC and Console are such intuitive choices for a fighting game, for the reasons listed above. Perhaps the only grey area in publishing on console in 2024 is whether you include Nintendo Switch. With the Switch winding down this year, and Nintendo’s next gen hardware coming in 2025, developing for it probably isn’t worth the squeeze. That doesn’t mention the hardware requirements for building on switch are just so different.
Okay let’s talk geographies. I love the fighting game community (FGC) because it is truly so global. There are your big 3 markets, but recent top players in SF6 are coming out of places like the Dominican Republic. Another example is Tekken and Pakistan. These 2 go hand in hand, I definitely recommend checking out this video the understand how magical this is.
Meet the players
“Which customers we’re going after” is also a relatively easy question to answer. Riot is trying to engage players from other Riot properties (namely League of Legends) and established fighting game fans. There are certainly more refined segments they are going after within each of these groups, and no doubt they’ll also be targetting some players who don’t play league or fighting games, but at a high level? Fighting game fans and League fans are who we’re going after.
What’s interesting is that the fighting game community, despite being passionate, isn’t THAT big. At least compared to other genres like MOBA’s, FPS’s, Adventure, etc. this is largely due to the pains we have listed above. The punchline is that, although it’s great that Riot is serving this segment, I do wonder if there are enough players from it to justify the investment. Bringing in players from League of Legends I believe will be critical to getting the scale this game needs to really succeed. Very few Riot games are small in scale or serve small audiences, maybe except Riot Forge which no longer exists :(.
I’ve been seeing 2XKO at events like EVO and I think that’s a great step in getting the fighting game player feedback needed…but on the League of Legends side of the aisle? It’s tough to say. Fighting games have a steep learning curve generally, and compared to League’s PC roots, the world of fight sticks, quarter circles, and SPD’s is very alien. Nailing this side of the customer segmentation is something I will watch closely…
How does this come together?
Alright so how do we throw this all together and deliver this aspiration to the player segments in our target markets? As mentioned above - it’s a 3 pronged approach. I’ll just drop a video to show the sort of messaging and positioning the 2XKO team is using to deliver on this promise.
Play special attention to the focus on community involvement - it really is something unique that I haven’t seen other fighting games.
What’s it going to take?
Finally we need to understand more tactically what this product strategy is going to look like? I’ve broken it up into 3 simple categories shown above, but something as complex as launching a new game like 2XKO requires a much more robust plan - this is just a starting point about how I would approach this product.
One thing I will add to this is the Netcode. Let me define it first:
NetCode: Fighting game netcode is the tech that manages online multiplayer gameplay in fighting games, ensuring smooth and synchronized gameplay despite potential internet latency. The goal is to make online matches feel as if the players are competing side by side (like on a couch or at an arcade), minimizing delays and lag that can affect gameplay fairness and responsiveness. Rollback netcode is a popular approach, predicting players' actions to keep the game moving smoothly and correcting inaccuracies retroactively when actual inputs differ from predictions. This contrasts with delay-based netcode, which introduces waiting times to align players' actions, often leading to a less responsive gaming experience.
Also the guy that invented Rollback netcode? It’s Tony Cannon, the executive producer on 2XKO. Insane.
One competitive advantage that Riot has with this is their deep experience with networking infrastructure. Look no further than Riot Direct, their own proprietary solution. I recommend you check out the link and learn more. There’s even something called “cold-potato routing” lol.
To Wrap.
This is certainly a very high level perspective on 2XKO’s product strategy, but without actually being in the Riot office and meeting with the devs, I think what we have here is pretty directional. Overall I’m bullish on this title. It’s semi-fresh IP for the FGC being built by a team of fighting game and live service experts. It’s getting valuable player feedback early and often and will be monetized in a very Riot way. If anyone can breathe fresh life into a new genre, whether that be Team Fight Tactics with auto-chess, or Legends of Runeterra with CCG , or Valorant with shooter, Riot can.
