Riot Co-Founder Says 2XKO Needed Millions of Monthly Users
Merrill's own numbers show the user target he set for 2XKO was in the range Street Fighter 6, the game he blames for disrupting the plan, sustains on Steam, which is why the live service stopped being fundable.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Marc Merrill said 2XKO would have needed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of monthly active users to keep its live service running. He cited the inability to secure enough players, a team he described as too large, and high costs. Development ends in December 2026, after the game launched in January 2026 and the team was scaled down that February.
2XKO launched in January 2026 to a development team that was cut the following month. By August, Riot had confirmed development would end in December, with only the servers left running afterward. In a podcast appearance on the Lemonade Stand channel, Merrill traced the trouble past launch: Rising Thunder's alpha arrived in 2015, Radiant Entertainment was acquired in 2016, and the project was restarted on the League of Legends IP before being announced in 2019 as Project L. A leadership change left the team isolated, and Merrill said the responsibility was theirs.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.