The problem with 2XKO wasn't that no one was playing the fighting game.The problem is the scale at which Riot initially set the project up.Company co-founder Mark Merrill said that given the existing cost structure, the game needed an audience in the "upper hundreds of thousands, if not millions" of active users.
A fighting game with the budget of a large service game
Merrill explained on the Lemonade Stand podcast that the team was too large and the production too expensive for the genre's audience.2XKO found a dedicated community, but its size was not enough to support its planned service model.
This complements Riot's own August statement: active development of 2XKO will end at the end of 2026.At the same time, servers will remain available, all champions will be unlocked, most cosmetic items will be combined into sets, and the company has promised to return purchases made before the announcement.
Why does the figure look huge?
Fighting games can live for years on a relatively compact audience, but 2XKO was created within a company accustomed to the scale of League of Legends and Valorant.The cost of the team required a very different level of coverage, Merrill said.
He also admitted that Riot missed the time window: development stretched so far that Street Fighter 6 managed to come out and strengthen the market before 2XKO.It turned out to be a rare case when the closure of active development is explained not by one unsuccessful mechanic, but by a discrepancy between the size of the project and the real size of its niche.
Context on the topic complements our material on calendar of the main releases of the week.
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