Riot Co-Founder: 2XKO Needed 'Millions' of Players to Survive

Ever wonder how many players a game actually needs to stay alive? Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill just dropped a bombshell about 2XKO, and the number is wild.

Speaking on The Lemonade Stand, Merrill explained that 2XKO would have needed "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" of monthly active players to justify its cost structure. For a fighting game, that's basically asking for the moon. Even Street Fighter 6, the biggest name in the genre right now, averages only 16,000 to 20,000 monthly active users on Steam (and PlayStation doesn't share its numbers). Riot knew hitting millions was a pipe dream.

So what went wrong? Merrill pointed to a few things. First, timing. "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," he said. Street Fighter 6's 2023 launch threw off Riot's plans to capture the fighting game crowd after Street Fighter V. Merrill believes if 2XKO had launched years earlier, it could have made a "significant impact."

Second, internal chaos. Merrill admitted Riot lacked "alignment" on the game's strategy, leading to "managerial fracturing" and confusion within the team. Despite having a talented dev team and a beautiful game, not enough players showed up. "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."

Riot's solution? Full refunds and canceled content updates. "Let's just pivot, let's create this box, give everybody a refund, say, 'Hey, sorry we weren't able to achieve this incredibly high aspiration... but we love you guys,'" Merrill explained. 2XKO was first revealed as Project L in 2019, and after a confusing release from closed beta to extended early access, Riot announced plans to end active development after December 2026, though online play will still be supported.

The fighting game community is still reeling. One player noted, "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." Another questioned Merrill's Street Fighter 6 comment: "Did he really not think 6 was going to happen?"

It's a tough lesson in just how brutal the live-service grind can be. What do you think—was 2XKO doomed from the start, or could better timing have saved it?