2XKO Needed “High Hundreds of Thousands” of Monthly Players, Riot’s Merrill Says

Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill said 2XKO would have needed a monthly active player base “in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to justify continued live-service support, IGN reported on October 3, 2026. Merrill made the remarks on The Lemonade Stand podcast, and IGN’s report came 44 days after Riot announced on August 20, 2026 that active development of the fighting game would end in December 2026.

What Merrill Said on The Lemonade Stand

According to IGN, Merrill tied the figure to the game’s cost structure: at that scale, the free-to-play fighter could support the kind of long-running live-service model it was designed around. He did not describe the number as a target Riot had published earlier, and Riot’s own August announcement does not state a player count.

Merrill took responsibility for the outcome. “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” he said, adding that 2XKO “resonated with some players, but not nearly enough players” to justify that approach. IGN reports that he described a lack of internal alignment on the game’s strategy, which he said produced “managerial fracturing” and confusion inside the team.

He also pointed to timing. Street Fighter 6 arrived, in his words, “something like eight years after we started working on 2XKO,” and he said that had the game launched “years before Street Fighter,” Riot “would have made a really significant impact on the community.” That is Merrill’s own assessment of a counterfactual, not a measured result. IGN notes that 2XKO was first revealed publicly as Project L in 2019.

What Riot Itself Announced on August 20, 2026

Riot’s announcement said active development would conclude at the end of 2026 because “we haven’t seen enough players stick with the game to get to a path toward sustainability.” The company said it evaluated retention, new players and engagement through 2026, not revenue alone, and saw “no meaningful, sustained change” in the game’s trajectory despite positive reactions to the releases of Akali, Senna, Thresh and the PvE mode The Climb. It also stated that “2XKO costs us substantially more to operate than it brings in.”

Riot’s post also describes what it saw working. The company said pockets of the fighting game community embraced 2XKO, with players pushing high-level play, duos becoming a way to play with friends, and tournament organizers adding the game to weekly lineups. In Riot’s words, though, “it just wasn’t happening enough”: it said dedicated tag-fighter fans loved the game, while most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stay.

Riot said it weighed reducing the team size, adjusting patch schedules and changing the business model before choosing to finish its work-in-progress content and sunset active development. The post adds that the free-to-play model carried a minimum player requirement from the start, without putting a number on it. Merrill’s range, as reported by IGN, is the only figure in the sources reviewed here.

What Players Get Through the End of 2026

Riot said servers will remain on beyond 2026 and the game will stay playable on all platforms, with advance notice promised if that changes. Offline play is unaffected. Two final champions are planned: Lux with patch 1.3.1, scheduled for September 8, 2026, and Samira in October. Riot’s plan is a final bug-fix patch in December.

The same patch was scheduled to unlock all champions for free, remove Battle Pass progression and disable Ranked lobbies, with a $39.99 Ultimate Bundle covering nearly all released cosmetics up to Lux. Riot said it is refunding KO Points and Starter Edition purchases made on or before August 20, 2026; its support page says those refunds are planned to be issued by November 1, 2026. Content players already own stays in their inventory. The 2XKO Competitive Series continues, with its final official event in November.

How to Read the Player-Count Comparison

IGN set Merrill’s range against Street Fighter 6, which it says averages between 16,000 and 20,000 monthly active users on Steam. IGN notes that figure excludes PlayStation, where such statistics are not shared publicly. Because the Steam-only number and Merrill’s figure do not cover the same platforms or the same definition of an active user, the two cannot be compared directly. IGN also reported that Merrill’s comments drew heated reactions in the fighting game community, with some players questioning how realistic the threshold was for the genre.

The Gaming.net report on Riot’s announcement places the game’s timeline as follows: the official name arrived in February 2024, the PC closed beta opened on September 9, 2025, and the official launch came on January 20, 2026, when it also arrived on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Confirmed: Riot will stop active development of 2XKO after a December 2026 bug-fix patch, and refunds and servers-on commitments are in writing in its announcement. Still open: Riot has published no player count, and it has not said how long servers will remain online after 2026 beyond its promise of advance notice.