Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill has revealed that its abandoned tag fighter 2XKO would have required a player count “in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to justify the enormous budget and time invested in its development. Speaking on The Lemonade Stand podcast this week, Merrill laid bare the behind-the-scenes missteps that led to the game’s cancellation, delivering a figure that has ignited fierce debate across the fighting game community.
Merrill, who serves as co-founder, co-chairman, and chief product officer of Riot Games, went into considerable detail about how the studio’s ambitious fighting game project unraveled. The staggering threshold he cited—far beyond what any competitive fighter could realistically achieve—has left many players stunned that a publisher of such enormous scale believed such numbers were necessary to keep 2XKO alive.
A Budget That Demanded Millions
The figure Merrill provided was, by his own admission, nearly impossible for the genre. Considering the game’s cost structure, he said 2XKO would have needed a monthly active user count in the high hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to rationalize its continued support as a live service title.
The reality on the ground told a very different story. For comparison, Street Fighter 6—the undisputed biggest fighting game on the market today—boasts an average of anywhere between 16,000 and 20,000 monthly active users on Steam alone, excluding PlayStation, which does not share these statistics publicly. Even accounting for Riot’s expectations as the maker of massively popular MOBA League of Legends, reaching “millions” of players was never a realistic prospect.
The Street Fighter 6 Timing Problem
Merrill pointed to timing as one of the critical factors in 2XKO’s downfall. He explained that Capcom’s Street Fighter 6, released in 2023, disrupted Riot’s original plans to capture a large share of the fighting game community’s interest away from its own title, Street Fighter V.
“I think we had a window to do some great things to really help the fighting game community, and then Street Fighter 6 came out, which was something like eight years after we started working on 2XKO. We had an awesome development team of really talented people that did great work, that made a beautiful game. We’d already communicated all this stuff to players, and so we were like, ‘You know what? Let’s just keep going. Let’s give it to the community. Let’s see what happens, right?’ I think if we came out, ideally when we should’ve, years before Street Fighter, I think we would have made a really significant impact on the community.”
Marc Merrill, Riot Games co-founder
“Nobody to Blame But Ourselves”
Beyond timing issues, Merrill acknowledged that Riot lacked internal “alignment” on the strategy for 2XKO, a failure he described as causing “managerial fracturing” and confusion within the team. Ultimately, not enough players joined the game to justify the time and money poured into it, prompting Riot to issue full refunds to players and cancel further content updates.
“We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” Merrill said. “[2XKO] resonated with some players, but not nearly enough players in order to justify the sort of live service, long-tail approach that the game was designed to do. And so we were like, let’s just pivot, let’s create this box, give everybody a refund… ‘Hey, sorry we weren’t able to achieve this incredibly high aspiration that we were trying to do for the fighting game community, but we love you guys, appreciate [you], hope they’ll play this game, like many other box games, for years to come.’ Sorry we let you down.”
A Community Reacts
Merrill’s comments quickly drew a swath of heated reactions from the fighting game community. Many players were left incredulous that Riot felt such an extraordinarily high player count was necessary to keep 2XKO afloat, particularly given how relatively niche the genre remains.
“It seems like they figured the game wasn’t going to last long, but they spent so much money on it, so instead of immediately canning it, they released it to see if it would do anything,” one player mused. “Unfortunately, what it needed to do goes way beyond what any fighting game has ever done in existence.”
Others questioned the studio’s foresight regarding Street Fighter 6’s release. “The way [Merrill said], ‘Then Street Fighter 6 came out,’ like that wasn’t going to happen. SFV had one of the best comeback stories in fighting games. Did he really not think 6 was going to happen?” another player asked.
Looking Ahead
2XKO was first revealed to the public as ‘Project L’ in 2019, though rumors of a fighting game based on the League of Legends IP had been circulating long beforehand. Its confusing release—moving from a closed beta to an extended early access—on the back of a lengthy development period effectively killed much of the hype surrounding the title.
Riot officially announced plans to end active development after December 2026, though online play will continue to be supported for players who wish to keep enjoying the game. As the fighting game community processes Merrill’s candid reflections, the studio’s willingness to openly acknowledge its missteps offers a rare glimpse into the challenges of entering an established and fiercely loyal genre.
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