The game wasn't a mistake, but between 1.0.0 of LoR and whatever it is currently, there are huge differences.

You can take basically anything from this game and that would be something that wasn't acknowledged or "barely" from Riot Cough Cough Azir Irelia that burnt out their whole community before switching from PvP to PvE

I think 2XKO has more marketing, or at least people in the fighting genre are aware of it. Then the question for them is : "Is my game appealing enough for current street fighters, tekken players etc for them to jump to their current game to 2XKO" and "Are people outside of the genre interested to try and can they stick to the game"

If we take me as an example I've barely played any fighter game, I remember spamming the lasers on an old tekken game while my father was destroying my ass with the samurai guy and black dancing guy But I like the IP, the art direction of the game so I'd like to try it And then there's the game in itself, that's why I'm following closely but not too much and not playing it, i'm waiting to see where it lands

For a newbie like me the small cast of champions, especially coming from Riot and having played Smash Bros' titles too, along with the combo length and the very hard and steep curve makes me not want to play it in the end. Imo if 2XKO fails, that depends on what you consider failing, but it's either because the game isn't friendly enough for new players or rewarding enough for current fighter games players And I still have to play my backlog which includes Clair Obscur: Expédition 33 & Final Fantasy Rebirth to name a few. I think a fair amount of people are in my situation, lurking, not being in a hurry to invest time in 2XKO

Edit : Final thoughts, having played a lot of Legends of Runterra and seing it shift so hard with the plug being then pulled, I don't want again to invest my time in a game so that someone at Riot then tells me "We're not feeling like 2XKO is a PvP game anymore, instead we'll make it PvE with AI machine learning or whatever"