Recently, I gave the fighting game 2XKO a try, despite having absolutely no familiarity with or attachment to the League of Legends universe. I know it has a massive player base. I know Riot is a massive company because of it. I just completely missed the boat. In 2XKO, I wanted to play Teemo, because a funny little guy with a blowgun is my second choice of main character right behind Big Beefer.

So when the news dropped that Riot was announcing layoffs for the team behind this weird little fighter—citing that the money numbers weren’t what they wanted—it landed in my stomach like a brick. Another group of actual humans facing the axe because a company can’t reckon with the idea that making infinite money forever might not be realistic.

I want to be clear up front: 2XKO is a free game. It’s a tag fighter in the vein of modern fighting games. You pick your team, load into the online jungle, and get called slurs by nine-year-olds. Upon booting it up—both to my chagrin and with absolutely no surprise—half the roster is locked behind a paywall. Don’t worry, they give you a single unlock token. The first one is free! You can unlock characters by playing the game, earning small amounts of currency through daily missions and wins or losses. You can also do the bailout method baked into every game now and buy premium currency with real-world dollarydoos.

Oh. And there’s a battle pass. Because of course there is.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve played basically any video game released since around 2006. I just ran through a ton of nonsense in those two paragraphs, much of which you probably skimmed right past without even flinching. How dare you.

I didn’t want to write this as a dunk piece on 2XKO, which I think is a perfectly fine tag fighter (for my money, just go play Street Fighter 6 if you want a good fighting game), or even on Riot specifically—though they absolutely do deserve it here. I wanted to document how we got this lost in the weeds. We’re the frog. The water’s been boiling for over two decades.

In the before-times, ancient gaming history, there are texts describing strange rituals where you unlocked characters by actually playing the game. The only shortcuts afforded to you were cheat codes, if they were available and known. You bought the game once. You played it until your kid brain moved on to the next Cheeto-crusted adventure. If you wanted Luigi in Melee, you went to Cheat Code Central and learned you had to finish a level with a specific number in the seconds column. The only time you needed your mom’s credit card was when you threw a fit in the Toys “R” Us checkout line to get Dino Crisis on PS1.

The first real crack in that model came with post-launch content: downloadable content, or DLC. These were additions released after launch to expand a game’s world, flesh out its story, or—famously (infamously?)—add cosmetic horse armor. At the time, it wasn’t inherently evil. It was more of the Wild West. Studios were testing the waters of what was possible. Would players pay a couple bucks for new multiplayer maps? Would they buy a bonus level?

But expectations shifted quickly. Multiplayer communities were nudged toward fear of missing out, intentionally or otherwise. Some studios went further, segmenting player bases entirely—if you didn’t own the maps, you didn’t get to play the modes. There was good mixed in here, but the foundation was being laid.

Once DLC entered the gaming consciousness, it became normalized. Map packs evolved into fighter packs, which evolved into seasonal content drops. By the late 2000s, post-launch content wasn’t just feasible—it was expected. That expectation gave studios room to plan games around base releases and expansions.

In a perfect world.

On the stupid-ass rock we live on, studios instead realized they could remove content from the base game, keep the price roughly the same, and sell it back later. The expectation of a finished game at launch softened. Good faith burned immediately, and the door opened to release-now, patch-later.

So now it’s the early 2010s. Bangs are swoopy. Hat bills are flat. And studios are getting bold. The era of paying once and receiving the whole thing is over.

The most famous example is Street Fighter IV. The game shipped on disc with DLC characters already present—fully modeled, animated, voiced. You just couldn’t access them. Why would you expect to? You hadn’t paid yet. Players saw through it immediately and were understandably livid.

It wasn’t alone. Mass Effect 3’s From Ashes DLC locked essential narrative content behind a day-one paywall. Around the same time, microtransactions began creeping into single-player games. Dead Space 3 sold resource packs, undercutting the scarcity and tension that define survival horror. Dragon’s Dogma introduced paid convenience through unlock keys. Something similar happened in the Borderlands series. Entire game modes were locked behind walls of dollar bills, as seen in Resident Evil 5. DLC had officially shifted from “extra, cool things” to “content we decided not to give you yet.”

The tension between player and creator became obvious. Players were trained to expect routine updates, incomplete launches, monetized convenience, evolving multiplayer ecosystems, and constant upsells. The video game industry has a long memory. Video game players do not. Infighting became more common—not between Xbox and PlayStation, but between people wanting to call out problems and people who just wanted to enjoy games. The pattern is always the same: push something outrageous, pull back slightly at the first backlash, then reintroduce it once everyone’s moved on.

DLC stopped being about expanding art and started being about extracting more money.

That brings us to now. Well, now-ish. Most big studio games fall into one of two buckets: $70 releases or “free” games. Indie titles get weird with pricing, so I’ll leave them out. Looking at some of my recently played games: NBA 2K26 greets you immediately on boot with microtransactions, MyTeam currency, seasonal scarcity, battle passes, pay-to-win mechanics, and paid convenience. Civilization VII splashes purchasable leaders across the main menu—leaders that were available day one. Then there’s Elden Ring, my perfect child, who can do no wrong. And then Overwatch, which at this point is just a fully colored bingo card of monetization tactics. Battle pass. Microtransactions. Rare skins. Paid convenience. Loot boxes—so blatant they were briefly illegal.

I didn’t even bother diving into loot boxes here. A literal gambling mechanic dressed up as surprise fun. What could possibly go wrong?

Most of these games still have an upfront price, with Overwatch being the major exception. I paid full price for that game at launch, because I’m old as hell. The issues I have with 2XKO are the same issues I’ve had with the games that made 2XKO possible—Fortnite, Apex Legends, modern Mortal Kombat titles, Overwatch.

Fortnite is one of the most consequential game releases I’ll ever see, on par with Minecraft or Pokémon. Its reach is enormous, genre-bending. It’s free. The barrier to entry is owning a device. But the money to be made from hooking even a small slice of that audience is massive. Not only are these games now readily available at full scale on mobile devices, the battle pass systems usually tie rewards to daily logins. Miss a day and you fall behind. Miss too many and you lose access to the best stuff. This isn’t subtle. This is designed to pull people—especially kids—back in every single day. I feel like I’m not the crazy one here.

The pressure this places on kids is enormous. FOMO hits them directly, and the pressure then shifts to parents to prevent exclusion. These games are actively working against them both. If these mechanics work on adults, they work even better on children.

So now we have a game ecosystem with gambling elements, $100 microtransactions that people actually buy, gameplay systems paywalled inside already-purchased games, daily login rewards that punish absence, and limited-time battle passes designed to turn leisure into obligation. And then studios have the gall to tell us they aren’t making enough money and need to lay people off.

Once upon a time, when it was just you, your NES, and a cartridge, if a game was bad, that company didn’t get another chance. Unless they were lucky, companies that got chance after chance like LJN. There was no expectation that every release had to make all the money in the world forever. The greed now is staggering.

Where I land on this—and what might actually help these companies hit their impossible sales expectations—is simple: maybe selling a solid number of games at $40 is better than trying to milk “whales” for $400 microtransactions in a “free” game, or selling a $70 title with $50 DLC under threat of layoffs.

“What in the world is a whale?” I hear you ask, stupidly. Well, a whale is a term that was lovingly bestowed upon your mom by me. But actually, the video game industry refers to big spenders as “whales” and everyone else as “minnows.” As if the concept wasn’t dehumanizing enough, the entire system is designed to hook a whale and extract as much money as possible. Doesn’t matter if they’re a kid, someone with impulse control issues, or a relapsed gambler. There’s money to be made in that blubber.

The conversation around games and money always circles back to ethics. If you want to spend your money on cosmetics, fine. But pretending the conversation ends there is bad faith. These systems don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re tests. Tests of patience. Tests of wallets. And until players are willing to let some of these companies fail by withholding their money, the envelope will keep getting pushed.

That’s a downer ending, huh?

The video game industry is fucking wild.