In 2010, the team at League of Legends developer Riot Games was feeling nervous. Their scrappy multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) was taking off, but a few hours south in Anaheim, Blizzard was preparing to launch Starcraft II, a blockbuster PC strategy game that could eat up their audience and smother League before it had a chance to explode. It was an inflection point for the studio and game industry as a whole. Both companies were asking the same fundamental question: "what do players want from online games?"Things worked out fine for League of Legends. 16 years after launch, it's still logging millions of daily average players and driving millions in revenue for Riot Games, which has since spun up other titles like Teamfight Tactics and Valorantand is about to dive into the tag-team fighting game genre with 2XKO.Now, the companyand the game industry as a wholeare asking that question again.A lot has changed in those 16 years. Riot Games and Blizzard Entertainment had to grow up. Both have settled lawsuits with the California Civil Rights Department over allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, and both have laid off workers in the face of rising production costs and plateauing player spending.League players have aged, meaning many can't commit as much time or physical effort into mastering their favorite champions. Younger players, raised on a feast of survival crafting games like Minecraft or social UGC games like Roblox, have different tastes. And as studio co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill pointed out to Game Developer in a conversation at DICE 2025, audience expectations for what are now called "live service games" are higher than ever, raising the stakes for projects that sometimes require hundreds of millions of dollars to get off the ground.So, how does the company move forward? Merrill said Riot is eyeing at the "social interactions" that are driving conversation about online games of late, but it's also sticking to its original strategy: converting players into people who say "I play League of Legends," instead of "I play video games."2XKO's social lobby will be key to its successUnlike MOBAs or tactical first-person shooters, fighting games have survived and thrived since the arcade eras thanks to robust, often player-driven meetups where players cheer each other on (or throw around trash talk) in real life. Riot has a history of spinning up esports events, but Merrill acknowledged meeting this community where it lives will require a more different approach.But a more interesting question was this: while Riot's publishing arms get 2XKO in front of players, how will the development team help players socialize online? The answer is in the game's pre-match lobby. As the company's revealed in its closed alpha tests, players spend time between matches not staring at a matchmaking screen, but navigating a digital arcade using customizable avatars.Riot's not the first to roll out a feature like this. Capcom's Street Fighter VI has a similar lobby feature. But in 2XKO's case you can see the groundwork for what you might call a "Roblox-ification" of online spaces. Emotes, character skins, the ability to just run around in circles next to your friends (making it a space for players who might just want to relax and chat with pals instead of square up for matches).Players in the lobby can even walk over to other arcade cabinets to peer at games in progresscertainly a more engaging way to spectate other games without navigating menus.Riot's been experimenting with its pre-game lobby design for several years, going so far as to update the League of Legends launcher to allow players to pre-select what roles they'd like to play before entering a lobbya significant move that cemented the fixed roles players take on in League matches (top lane, mid lane, "jungler," etc.).It's an effective menu, but it's also overwhelming for new or (speaking from recent personal experience) returning players. "You can dunk on it," Merrill said in reference to the League main menu as we compared and contrasted the two systems.A perhaps unfair ribbing of the menu screen experienced by most of Riot Games' customers' aside (that is carefully maintained and updated by hardworking developers, the compare-and-contrast allowed us to discuss Riot's top-level strategy for the "lifespan" of its online gamesand how taking a wide a view as possible of that lifespan is essential to its continued market position.Avoiding conventional "industry logic" about online gamesMerrill laid out two ideas about the future of online games that he fundamentally disagrees with. First, he said it's "absurd" to think that young Roblox players are forever bound to the block-based game's ecosystem, "A lot of times the social motivations and [desire] to play where your friends are playingthose things are incredibly powerful," he said. "But that doesn't mean if somebody grew up in Roblox, that all they're gonna do for their life is played like block games or a Roblox-like." Those playerslike any other playerare on the hunt for experiences that resonate with them, those experiences may just take different forms.The second idea, was that the only way for a company to view an online game's lifespan was through the lens of growth, peak, and inevitable decline. If you followed that logic, League of Legends would be considered a failure since its monthly average user count is estimated to have peaked in 2022."One thing we try to fight a lot is the mindset that the product life cycle is one of growth, a spike, and then a slow decline. That's also silly," he said. "There is entropy, there's downward pressure, it's hard to keep people engaged over a long period of time and continue to make it fresh. But that doesn't mean there aren't incredible things to do to improve the experience."Those "things" might not just be updates to the content pipeline. Riot's triple-pronged strategy of esports, animated adaptations, and music productions are all part of the strategy to sustain League of Legends even though it may not be as popular as it was in the 2010s. "That would never have happened if we were like 'well, you know, we start to see churn rates increasing, time to go move all resources to something else,'" said Merrill.Devs who want to follow this strategy but maybe don't have Riot's cash can still study its success. "Look at it from a motivational lens," he continued. "Why do people like this game in the first place? And then it's, are [you] doing a sufficient job of delivering to those expectations or not?" He pointed to Blizzard's World of Warcraft as another game executing on this strategy (without an animated Netflix show in sight...just don't ask about a certain 2016 feature film).Elsewhere, Riot continued experimenting in a bid to minimize the infamous toxicity that's become affiliated with League of Legends. Merrill repeated the company's talking point that in-game harassment is far less prevalent than it may seem from the outside (but the few bad eggs going above and beyond to hurt people have a big impact, he acknowledged), but there are fascinating new frontiers to explore. Of late, he said Riot is studying how the dynamics of League matches drive toxicity, sometimes driven by a misalignment between what different teammates want out of a match."Some [toxic] players feel justified on what they're doing and why," he said, laying out a use case where a player in the "ADC" role (a damage-focused role in League of Legends) might feel frustrated by a "support" player not keeping up with them or being repeatedly taken out by the enemy team.Or there's the inversewhere a support player is playing passively and has an ADC teammate they can't keep up with. Across millions of games being played, some percentage of them will trigger that "emotional spike" for players, and they'll say a thing they might not say otherwise. He compared it to how even the most mild-mannered of people will get aggressive when caught in traffic.Identifying those mismatches is relatively easy. The solutions are tricky. He said Riot is examining if there are matchmaking solutions to help players looking for similar experiences, saying it's an "untapped frontier." But if Riot overcommits to that strategy, it risks taking away some of the friction of a competitive multiplayer game.If there's one takeaway for other developers from the multi-pronged approach Riot is taking to changing player demographics, it's that you don't have to look at the popular interest in emerging genres as a sign players aren't into your game. Times change, tastes change, and companies can risk falling behind the curvebut you don't have to look at tomorrow's players as an impossible enigma. Just like yesterday's, they're searching for great experiences, and there's good odds your game might just be what they're looking for.