Riot Co-Founder Says 2XKO Would Have Needed Hundreds of Thousands or Millions of Players to Survive

Riot Games co-founder Marc 'Tryndamere' Merrill disclosed the scale of 2XKO's commercial challenge on the Lemonade Stand podcast, stating the game would have needed "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" of players to remain viable. The admission offers insight into why Riot cancelled the fighting game and is winding down development by December 2026.

Merrill traced 2XKO's origins to Rising Thunder, a free-to-play fighting game Riot acquired when it purchased Radiant Entertainment in 2015. The original concept aimed to deliver accessible yet deep competitive fighting gameplay using League of Legends IP, specifically the Cannon brothers, paired with Riot's competitive ecosystem.

Internal misalignment hampered the project from the outset. Merrill acknowledged that shifting leadership and conflicting strategic priorities fractured the development team. "With changes in leadership, there wasn't alignment on the strategy, which then caused managerial fracturing and the team to kind of be on their own, and hear from different people at the company," Merrill said on the podcast, hosted by Brandon 'Atrioc' Ewing, Aiden 'Calvin' McCaig, and Douglas 'DougDoug' Wreden.

The timing of Street Fighter 6's June 2023 release proved decisive. Merrill believed 2XKO had a narrow window to establish itself in the fighting game community, but Capcom's major title effectively closed that opportunity. "I think we had a window to do some great things to really help the fighting games community, then Street Fighter 6 came out, which was something like eight years after we started working on 2X," Merrill explained.

Despite this setback, Riot elected to release 2XKO anyway. "We had an awesome development team of really talented people that did great work, that made a beautiful game, and we had already communicated all this stuff to players, so we were like, 'You know what? Let's just keep going, and let's give it to the community and see what happens.'" Merrill said.

The game ultimately resonated with a smaller audience than required. "One thing that's important with 2X is that it resonated with some players, but not nearly enough players in order to justify the sort of live-service, long-tailed approach that the game was designed to do," Merrill stated. When asked directly what player count would have sustained 2XKO, he replied that at the game's cost structure, "it would have been in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions." He added the game was "too expensive, too big a team."

Riot announced in August that 2XKO would cease active development in December 2026. The company is providing all in-game content to existing players and processing refunds for those who purchased battle passes or cosmetics.