Riot Says 2XKO Needed Millions Of Players To Be Viable
Riot's chief product officer says the fighting game would have needed a monthly active user base in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Riot Games chief product officer Marc Merrill has said that 2XKO would have needed an enormous audience to survive. Speaking on a podcast, he put the required base of monthly active users in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions. That measure counts unique players who log in and do something at least once in a month, so it sits far above the number of concurrent users typically seen in a fighting game at any one moment.
The comment helps explain why Riot has changed course on the project. The studio has ended development on 2XKO as a live service and is turning it into what Merrill described as a box game, a shift that came with layoffs. The bar he set sits well above the usual size of the fighting game audience. As a rough comparison, Street Fighter 6 has recorded a peak of around 30,000 concurrent players on PC, a small fraction of the monthly total 2XKO would have needed. The decision reflects a difficult year for the industry, which has brought job cuts and cancellations at studios of every size.
Tags
- pc
- business
Sources
Where this story ran: 2 outlets on 2 October 2026. The summary above is written by GamersGuild; the links go to the original reports.