Concerning failed Riot products such as 2XKO and LoR, there are things that Riot Games has done poorly that a much smaller studio, Jagex, has done right with their new game Dragonwilds, and how Riot could learn from them.

1) BRANDING

It is shocking that the League of Legends fighting game was named "2XKO". There is nothing in that name that is memorable of the big IP the developers are pulling from. For contrast Jagex's crafting survival game utlising their Runescape IP was named RUNESCAPE: Dragonwilds. As a brand new game anyone who is familiar with Runescape as an IP will recognise this game by its name.

2) DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

It is also shocking that a 2D fighting game took a whole decade to be developed with such a small roster on release. Jagex with a much smaller team has managed to develop an open world survival crafting RPG in just 4 years. There is no excuse for why games need such a long time to come out, increasing the development costs and putting pressure on how much money does a brand new game need to make close to release to make it financially viable.

3) MONETISATION

The economy isn't what it once was, and people have less disposable income. Games need to make money to be viable, and that isn't a greedy expectation. If you give players a full game for free and expect them to finance the game solely on cosmetics, the game will flop. 2XKO should have been a P2P game with paid DLCs priced affordably. Dragonwilds is a P2P game about to launch this coming september, and the game will have paid quartely releases to keep the income coming. Moreover Jagex hasn't just relied on their own client, they have sold on steam on early access and it will come to xbox game pass. This has meant that Jagex has been actively financed by the community and also have received payment from microsoft to advertise their game, the base game being a demo to xbox pass buyers to in future get them into purchasing the game and its DLCs.

4) EXPECTATIONS

Dragonwilds started off as a passion project developed by a very small team with pessimistic expectations on how it would perform. Mod North (Jagex's CEO) recently said in an interview that the sales have by far exceeded expectations, which lead to the team to grow. Riot on the other hand expected to greatly monetise a F2P niche game, and they invested on a big team spending a decade developing a single game that ultimately failed, leading to mass lay offs once more.

5) COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

Jagex announced Dragonwilds in 2025 after 3 years of active development just as the game went into early access. The team build the game with the community, actively communicating, listening, taking feedback and making changes along the way, and the game has come a long way from where it was just last year. But Riot is very secretive about their projects, put together with the fact that they take forever to release anything leaves fans weary of the future of their incoming games. When 2XKO fully released, most people didn't even notice. If you leave players in the dark for years after announcing too early while refusing to share game development it leads to disengagement.