Riot Will End Active Development On 2XKO At The End Of The Year

Riot Games has announced that it will cease active development on its tag‑team fighting title, 2XKO, by the end of December. The studio explained that, despite a strong initial buzz, the player base did not grow enough to support long‑term viability, prompting the decision to halt further updates. 2XKO launched across PC and consoles in January of this year.

Before shutting down, Riot will continue to polish the game with improvements, bug fixes, and additional content. Once development stops, the servers will remain online, allowing the community to continue playing without interruption.

The servers are slated to stay operational past 2026, ensuring that 2XKO remains playable on all supported platforms. Throughout 2026, Riot plans to roll out new content, feature enhancements, and two fresh champions—Lux and Samira—culminating in a final bug‑fix patch scheduled for December. Afterward, the servers will persist solely to support online multiplayer, while offline gameplay will remain unaffected. Riot will provide advance notice should any of these plans change.

To ease the transition, Riot will unlock all champions and bundle most cosmetic items. Players who spent money on the game before August 20 will receive refunds, and all purchased content will remain theirs. Avatar and profile items will be redeemable for Credits, a change that will take effect with patch 1.3.1 in September.

From the outset, 2XKO struggled to find its footing. The console launch was riddled with technical glitches, and just a month before the scheduled release, Riot announced a layoff of 80 employees who had been working on the title.

Despite the rocky start, the game managed to earn a spot on the main stage of EVO earlier this year, and it has since been featured in several prominent fighting‑game tournaments.

In a surprisingly transparent move for a major publisher, Riot has explained why it is ceasing active development on 2XKO. While the game attracted considerable player interest and high‑level competition, Riot said those factors alone were insufficient to meet the minimum player‑retention threshold it deemed necessary to keep the title viable. The company’s original strategy—to build trust among core fighting‑game enthusiasts and gradually expand its audience as new features and content rolled out—has been undermined by the decision to shut the game down less than a year after launch.