Riot Games Co-Founder Says 2XKO Needed ‘Hundreds of Thousands, if Not Millions’ of Monthly Active Players to Survive

The co-founder, co-chairman, and chief product officer of Riot Games, Marc Merrill, revealed the number of monthly active users 2XKO would have needed to justify its budget, and the eye-popping amount has sparked an animated debate within the fighting game community.

Speaking on The Lemonade Stand, Merrill went into detail about what happened behind the scenes at Riot to cause 2XKO’s catastrophic failure, and provided a ballpark figure of monthly active users the game would have needed in order to justify how much money and time was spent on its development.

It’s no surprise that this figure was, to put it lightly, pretty unrealistic for a fighting game; Merrill said that, considering its cost structure, 2XKO would have needed a player count “in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to rationalize its continued support.

Merrill also mentioned Street Fighter 6, saying the 2023 release of Capcom’s juggernaut title threw off their plans to take a big chunk of the fighting game community’s interest off the back of 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,” Merrill explained. “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.”

Merrill explained that Riot didn’t have internal “alignment” on the strategy for 2XKO, which caused “managerial fracturing” and confusion within the team. Ultimately, not enough players hopped on the game in order to justify the time and money spent on it, so Riot did what they thought was best — issued full refunds to players and canceled further content updates.

“We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” he 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, say, ‘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, and here you go. Sorry we let you down,’ is sort of the orientation of what happened there.”

For comparison, Street Fighter 6 — which is indisputably the biggest fighting game on the market right now — boasts an average of anywhere between 16,000 and 20,000 monthly active users on Steam (not including PlayStation, which doesn't share these statistics publicly). It’s understandable that Riot, the maker of massively popular MOBA League of Legends, might expect more than that — but even Riot themselves knew there was no way they could reach “millions” of monthly active users to justify keeping their tag fighter alive.

Unsurprisingly, Merrill’s comments have sparked a swath of heated reactions within the fighting game community. Most players were left stunned that Riot felt such a high player count was necessary to keep 2XKO afloat, given how relatively "niche" the genre is.

“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 lol.”

“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 asked.

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 swirling around long beforehand. Its confusing release (from a closed beta to extended early access) on the back of a lengthy development period essentially killed most of the hype around the game, and Riot officially announced plans to end active development after December 2026, though online play will still be supported.