I find myself pretty gloomy about the shutdown of 2XKO—but not because I'll miss it on a personal level. I don't have the mental bandwidth to training-montage myself into a serious fighting game player other than a few stints with Guilty Gear: Strive, but I did have a reasonable time messing around with 2XKO during its beta. And while I'm aware my lack of continued playing makes me part of the problem, I genuinely felt a little sad to see it sink into the waves as Riot announced it was winding down development.

But I'm also feeling blue for another reason. While I don't necessarily blame Riot for not wasting money in this quarterly-results-driven culture of ours, I also really don't think this sort of attitude helps me believe in the vision of its upcoming MMO, whose details are wrapped in the mists of a development mirage.

Riot laid off most of its developers less than three weeks after 2XKO's release—roughly 80 people. People like Patrick Miller, an amazing steward of fighting games who's written a book on the genre. The fact it's shutting down the game less than a year after that "inspired" (these air quotes are so heavy) move speaks to me of a corporate impatience that MMOs seriously struggle to survive. As Raph Koster told me this year in our Terminally Online column, MMOs have become incredibly expensive.

MMOs are costly to run and take a long time to get cooking. The continued success of everything that isn't WoW (which found major success right away and sat fat and glad for years) isn't due to some goldrush mentality, but because they've been steadily sustained for over a decade—once you get a solid playerbase, an MMO will keep breadwinning for you for years to come.

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