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2XKO Monthly Players Needed to Reach a Huge Scale
When Riot Games decided to end active development of 2XKO this December, one question immediately followed: how large did the game actually need to become for Riot to keep investing in it? We now have a much clearer answer.
Riot co-founder and co-chairman Marc Merrill says 2XKO needed to attract hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of monthly active players to justify its long-term future as a live-service fighting game.
That helps put Riot’s recent decision to end active development of 2XKO into perspective. The problem was not simply whether the game could maintain a dedicated fighting game community, but whether it could reach a scale substantially beyond what most games in the genre typically achieve.
Riot Needed to Reach Beyond the Traditional FGC
Merrill discussed the numbers on The Lemonade Stand podcast, explaining that Riot’s live-service model required a much larger and more consistently active audience. According to Merrill, the company was looking for monthly active player numbers in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
That is a considerable target for a fighting game. Comparisons with titles such as Street Fighter 6 require caution, particularly because publicly available Steam figures represent only one part of a multiplatform audience and are not equivalent to monthly active users. Even so, IGN’s coverage of Merrill’s comments highlights just how far Riot’s expectations extended beyond the traditional fighting game market.
For Riot, a smaller but passionate community apparently wasn’t enough to sustain the ongoing development, content production, and infrastructure expected of 2XKO as a live-service game.
Street Fighter 6 May Have Changed the Landscape
Merrill also suggested that timing may have worked against 2XKO. He believes Riot could potentially have made a bigger impact if its fighting game had arrived earlier, before Street Fighter 6 established itself as one of the defining modern entries in the genre.
Instead, 2XKO spent years in development and eventually entered a market where players already had several established fighting games competing for their attention.
That does not mean Street Fighter 6 directly caused 2XKO’s struggles, but Merrill appears to believe Riot missed an earlier opportunity to establish itself within the Fighting Game Community before the current generation became more competitive.
2XKO Servers Are Not Shutting Down Yet
December will mark the end of active development, rather than the immediate disappearance of 2XKO. Riot has said the game’s servers will remain available beyond that point, allowing existing players to continue playing online. No date has been confirmed for when those servers might eventually be taken offline.
For 2XKO, that distinction matters. The game may continue to have a community after development stops, but Merrill’s comments make clear that Riot never aimed to build a modestly successful fighting game.
It needed the game to grow into something much larger, and reaching hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of monthly players was apparently the threshold that ultimately proved too high.
