2026 is shaping up to be a surprisingly depressing year for game fans. On Thursday, Riot Games announced that it is ending active development on its League of Legends-themed fighting game 2XKO, just 8 months after its official launch. The team will release a final content patch in October, with active development ending in December. The servers will stay online, and in-game purchases made before Aug. 20 will be refunded. Riot explained that even after content updates, it “saw no meaningful, sustained change in 2XKO’s trajectory; only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability.” The company also said, “Over time it became clear it would be impossible for us to continue actively developing the game as we are today.”
That’s done little to calm players of 2XKO, who have been bashing Riot for abandoning the game less than a year after launch.
What players are saying
While reactions to the news have ranged from “I told you so” to abject doomerism, the most common response has been disappointment. “I quit my job to play this game. Hopefully RIOT gives me a refund too,” fighting game pro Diaphone jokingly wrote on X (for context, he recently left his full-time job to focus on streaming and competing in fighting games). While many saw the writing on the wall after Riot laid off half the staff who worked on the game in February, most didn’t expect the announcement to come so soon.
The streamer Ludwig criticized Riot leadership more directly. “Bro riot is inane [sic]. It feels like mark marrell [sic, Ed’s note: Marc Merrill is Riot Games’ Chief Product Officer] has the company in a chokehold where if their game doesn’t make 1 billion dollars instantly he shuts it down. No community building, no thought of making a beautiful game just pure profit or die.” In January 2024, Riot ended active development on the beloved digital CCG Legends of Runeterra, which made many cautious about 2XKO‘s future. Others pointed out that the infamous platformer fighter Multiversus received more support, which doesn’t appear to make sense given that 2XKO was funded by the company that makes League of Legends.
Some have taken the game’s failure as an ominous sign for the future of the fighting game genre. A post on the r/Fighters subreddit titled “2XKO failing has lasting ramifications for the FGC” gained traction, arguing that investors will point at the recent financial failures of games like 2XKO and Invincible VS (which recently laid off 75% of its staff) as reasons to avoid investing in future genre entries.
Others have taken to memes to dull the pain, because at a certain point, what else can you do?
What went wrong with 2XKO?
Since it was announced in 2019 as Project L, 2XKO was hyped by some in the fighting game community as a game that could change the genre for good. Between its free-to-play model and backing from League of Legends developer Riot Games, many were quite hopeful. Then came years of waiting. Riot Games acquired Radiant Entertainment to make a fighting game in 2016, but 2XKO didn’t officially release until 2026.
Beyond the long development cycle, 2XKO released with only 10 characters, which is extremely low for a tag fighting game. Its monetization was criticized as overly expensive, with a launch skin package that cost roughly $100 in in-game currency. The free-to-play model has rarely worked for fighting games, with Multiversus being another example of this approach backfiring. It doesn’t help that the game’s name has been widely derided, with many incredulous that Riot didn’t put League of Legends in the title for clarity. Others have argued that beyond the bad name, the game was marketed very poorly, barely being promoted through the ever-popular League of Legends MOBA or elsewhere.
And then there’s 2XKO‘s central gameplay, which, while praised by many hardcore fighting game players, didn’t seem to resonate with a more casual audience. The game has high damage and the capacity for incredibly difficult-to-block mix-ups, so casual players were likely blown out of the water immediately. Tag-fighting games like 2XKO are historically niche because of theirdifficulty, and it doesn’t help that 2XKO lacks single-player options, making it a tough sell for beginners. While the game does offer affordances for newcomers, like a simplified control scheme, it appears that wasn’t enough. As Riot wrote on its blog, “Even within the genre, diehard tag fighter players loved 2XKO, but most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stick with the game.“
A strange element of the situation is that even if 2XKO didn’t meet Riot’s internal targets, it clearly had a dedicated audience, as shown by the game’s entrant numbers at this year’s Evo Las Vegas — it was third in registration, ahead of games that have been supported for much longer like Guilty Gear Strive. Regardless, Riot said that “2XKO costs us substantially more to operate than it brings in.”
While the fighting game genre won’t be going away any time soon thanks to mainstays like Street Fighter and Tekken, 2XKO‘s failure may unfortunately scare away publishers from funding new IP.
