It Is Literally Impossible For Patrick Miller to be Responsible for 2XKO's Demise
A lot of internet yap has been made to put Patrick Miller down after he posted his perspective on 2XKO's development, explaining why he made the decisions that he made, etc.
You can read it here at your leisure if you have not already done so.
This piece you are reading right now, however, isn't so much a commentary on his experience but rather an explanation as to why it is impossible for him to even be responsible for the game's ceasing development, not in the least because he was fired way before Riot published the decision. Here they are, informed by my own experiences and what I've observed over the internet.
Patrick Miller had no way to significantly influence monetization of the title
This is something he brings up in the blog linked above, but his responsibilities lied solely in the game's design and not its marketing or monetization. I will go one step further: Due to the game's monetization schemes, he was effectively shut out from influencing the monetization beyond roster choices, which were likely handed to him from on high.
In a live service game, the game is the platform in which you sell goods and services. His responsibility here is to make a platform that people wanted to engage with, and if my experience this past weekend running a 2XKO bracket at UMAD is any indication, people wanted to engage with it. If Riot had intended to sell the game the same way every other fighting game is sold, via a paid license (I know, I know, we should push for actual ownership of the product, but bear with me here), he would have more responsibility to make a platform that people want to immediately pay money to access. That is not how they decided to do things, likely wanting to leverage their expertise in live service games such as League of Legends and Valorant.
2XKO monetized, as I understand it (I did not follow it much so I may be wrong here), with character skins and paying for early ownership of the characters. As in, the characters could be bought for free via in-game currency earned by playing the game, but if you wanted to speed up the process you could pay money to do so. The idea being, you develop an attachment to a character you have a temporary unlock for and want to play them immediately following the week they are free, you can buy them immediately. If you find that there's a skin you really want for them, you can pay money to get it. This follows League of Legends' monetization scheme closely if you are familiar with it.
As the lead designer, he knows exactly what he wants for the game. He needs a rushdown character, he needs a zoning character, he needs a grappler, he needs a setplay character, etc. From there, he has a set of ideas as to who would fit what. However, that does not mean what he says, goes. Producers and product managers likely have the final say here. For example, if he were to ask for Renata Glasc specifically, there is a high chance product would say "No" due to her lack of popularity (according to a random internet search I did) and thus lack of potential monetization. That doesn't mean to say there weren't inspired picks in the game (Ekko alone was likely one nobody saw coming, and he was among the first revealed), just that there is a limit to the influence even a lead designer can wield.
It's something I see every day at my job. We get handed a set of art assets (I'm intentionally keeping it vague but if you know you know), what the monetization intent is for these, and then we craft what their stats/capabilities are following our own design intentions (more often than not, it's to solve a problem we unfortunately caused way back, but we've gotten better about that). Even then, I'd argue we have more influence on the monetization here because we directly sell these so if they are perceived by the players to be trash... we're not making much money off them. And then we get yelled at by product.
Riot Games had unrealistic expectations of the game's monetization
This, I do not say lightly. A simple look at every project Riot Games has shuttered in the past should be enough to convince you that they have unrealistic expectations for practically all their projects, even those that their genres have not historically monetized as strongly as MOBAs or team-based FPSes.
I'm talking about Legends of Runeterra and their Riot Forge initiatives here. Whether the financial analysts were sold a bill of goods or did a poor job of analyzing the market, the end result is that they stopped development because the return was not worth it.
Some made the argument that they shouldn't have spent 10 years on the project, but that, to me, is also a failure of those who hold the purse strings. After all, they gave them the money for this long. It is also disingenuous to imply that this would be the fault of those who made the game, as they are not the final arbiters of whether development continues or if they have to go back to the drawing board. If producers don't okay it, you're kinda stuck.
Others claimed that he should have kept the monetization aspect more core to his designs. This is where it gets a little bit more complicated. A relatively unknown job title within the gaming populace is that of the economic designer. The person who designs how much time should it take to unlock a character without paying anything, how much rewards an event should give, the person who designs all of the dark patterns everyone complains about? That's them. If there is one person (or several, I don't know how many were assigned to 2XKO as I'm writing as an outsider here) who, in the design team, is responsible for how the game monetizes, it is the economic designer.
As lead, Patrick Miller would have some oversight on them, but ultimately he has to trust them to make something good for the game's short and long-term survival. In the same way a lead would need to trust the people under them to create interesting characters, desirable features, etc. Economic designers, in my experience, are also closer to product management than the actual game design part of the game, but they are necessary to both. It is a specialization of game design, and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Even then, it is entirely possible that game design and economic design are two separate specializations within Riot and they never even interacted outside of just knowing what the other did. Every company is different!
Still, all these people control is the "how" it happens. They don't set the goals, that goes up to the producers and above. That's pretty much what design is: you get handed a problem/mandate, and it's your job to figure out how to fix it, and then document exactly how you can fix it because you have to rely on other disciplines (IE: Programmers, User Interface artists, etc.) to make your design real.
Another aspect is that demographically speaking, the Fighting Game Community isn't exactly the MOBA/FPS community. They don't exactly have a lot of money to throw around on frivolities such as character skins or purchasing early ownership of characters, or usually have interests that go beyond fighting games and don't necessarily want to mix them (how many 2XKO players are also Uma Musume players, as an example, and how many were paid users for one and not the other?)
And finally, probably the most subjective and yet most important one.
Do you know how many opps Riot Games has?
No, really. Riot Games came into the fighting game community, where several people were hating on them out of principle due to the CEO's harassment scandals, due to hating League of Legends, as well as several other reasons, and thought people would forget. They could hire practically every single SoCal fighting game person they could (and they did - from the Cannon brothers as executive producers, to the aforementioned Patrick Miller to lead, and several others whose names I'm forgetting), and there is a sizeable amount of the community that would have hated on it regardless because it's Riot.
Ignoring that and putting it at the feet of a lead designer trying to do a job is like saying City of the Wolves failed because of the lead designer rather than massive backlash over including a real life rapist in the launch roster and the owners putting their thumb on the scale on the roster choices.
It is simply ignoring reality.
Whether there was a path to proper monetization, or if they did something specific that could have changed the end result I can't say. As a designer, you're lucky if your design goes in the game relatively unscathed. Compromises often have to be made, and sometimes for the most ridiculous of reasons such as "that other guy didn't like the name you gave to the thing despite everyone else thinking it's fine".
The one thing I can say for sure is that it is literally impossible for Patrick Miller to be responsible for 2XKO's demise considering the above, and claiming that is folly.
Are there questions I'd like to ask to him that might be more negative-slanted? Sure, but they'd be more asking about why his influences/preferences don't seem to be present in 2XKO (Note: he is a big CvS2 and XRD head, and I just don't see that in what little I've played/bracket ran of the game), despite him not liking the more modern games 2XKO is closer to. You know, things that relate to the design of the game. Otherwise known as what he actually did on the game. He might have answered that in the article, too.
That's right, the entire "defense" (I honestly don't think it is, it's just explaining the realities of the industry, but it is a defense against what I view as a false statement if nothing else) was written without even reading what he wrote. I didn't need to do it, since the hatred shown his way wasn't even about what he wrote. It was about what talking heads on the internet said about what he wrote, and I think that's what annoyed me here.
There are valid questions and criticisms that can be levied towards 2XKO but blaming one singular lead designer for a decision that happened at least 3 rungs above him? That's just incorrect.
And hey, you know who's still at Riot? Tom and Tony Cannon, the executive producers of 2XKO.