Riot Games' 2XKO needed a monthly active user base "in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" to sustain itself as a live service title, according to Riot co-founder, co-chairman and CPO Marc Merrill.

Speaking on The Lemonade Stand podcast (as spotted by IGN), Merrill said the fighting game resonated with some players, but that audience was "not nearly enough" to support the intended live service model. Riot ended active development of 2XKO in August after concluding the game cost "substantially more to operate than it [brought] in, and engagement stayed relatively flat despite larger updates."

The game remains playable and free to download on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with servers set to stay online "beyond 2026."

The MAU threshold matters for any studio weighing a free-to-play fighting game with a competitive ecosystem attached. Merrill's framing effectively sets a benchmark: a niche-appeal genre entry carrying live service costs needs a player base approaching seven figures to clear operations — a bar 2XKO never approached.

Merrill also pointed to timing as a structural problem. He cited the release of Street Fighter 6 as a direct factor in 2XKO's failed launch.

"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 said.

"We had an awesome development team of really talented people that did great work and made a beautiful game. We'd already communicated all this stuff to players, and so we were like, 'You know what? Let's keep going, let's give it to the community. Let's see what happens.'"

He added: "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."

The project's roots trace back to Riot's 2016 acquisition of Radiant Entertainment. Radiant's free-to-play fighter Rising Thunder, which launched in alpha in 2015, served as a major inspiration for 2XKO. After the acquisition, Riot pulled Rising Thunder from storefronts and cancelled it, releasing the code as open-source a year later.

Merrill said the plan was to combine Rising Thunder's "simple controls and cool concept relating to a 1v1 fighting game" with "the League IP with the Cannon brothers, and add a cool Riot-style competitive ecosystem" — the combination that produced 2XKO.

Internal execution also failed the project. Merrill acknowledged that leadership changes produced a lack of "alignment on the strategy, which then caused managerial fracturing," and that the development team received conflicting guidance over the project's direction.

"We've got nobody to blame but ourselves," Merrill concluded.

For the fighting game category, the takeaway is operational rather than sentimental: genre IP and free-to-play monetization do not guarantee a viable live service audience, and a delayed launch against an entrenched franchise like Street Fighter 6 can close the market window entirely. Riot has committed to keeping 2XKO's servers online beyond 2026, and Merrill's account of internal misalignment offers a case study studios will likely cite when scoping competitive free-to-play projects.