Riot's Merrill: 2XKO Needed Millions of Players to Survive

Riot Games chief product officer Marc Merrill said 2XKO would have needed a monthly active user base in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to be sustainable. In comments reported by gamesindustry.biz, Merrill said the fighting game's audience was not nearly enough to support its intended live service model.

Merrill also cited the release of Street Fighter 6 as a factor in 2XKO's unsuccessful launch.

The numbers point to a structural problem rather than a single misstep. A live service game needs a large, recurring player base to fund ongoing updates, servers, and support. By Merrill's own threshold, 2XKO fell well short.

Background

In August, 2XKO ended active development because it cost substantially more to operate than it brought in, and engagement stayed relatively flat despite larger updates. The game remains playable and free to download on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with servers staying online beyond 2026.

Street Fighter 6 arrived something like eight years after Riot began working on 2XKO. In 2016, Riot acquired Radiant Entertainment, whose free-to-play title Rising Thunder was released in alpha in 2015 and served as a major inspiration for 2XKO. After the acquisition, Riot removed Rising Thunder from storefronts and eventually cancelled it, but released it as open-source a year later.