2XKO Will End Active Development at Year's End

That was fast...

The headline is basically the whole story. Riot Games has officially announced that active development on 2XKO, the fighting game featuring League of Legends characters, will cease in December 2026. The announcement comes following poor performance for the game in terms of player numbers that justify the developer's continued investment in the title. The servers will continue to be maintained by Riot beyond 2026, all heroes will be unlocked for everyone, and all money players spent on in-game microtransactions will be refunded to all users. Lux and Samira are still set to release in September and October as planned.

The end of 2XKO seems very sudden, but the story is a bit more complicated than that, given that nearly a decade of development stands behind the game, which was first announced back in 2019 and only reached release this past January, after a long period of uncertainty regarding the game and its development process. Riot writes in their announcement that "the game's goal was to address issues we knew the fighting game community faced, like stable netcode, making competitive grinding feel less lonely, investing in more timely updates, and more. While the fighting game genre has continued to progress over the last decade, we believe 2X met most of our goals."

On the game's business model, they wrote: "We hoped that if we offered the game for free, we could make the fighting game genre more accessible to new players, and that they could fall in love with the fighting game genre in the same way. Ideally this would happen over time, first with the trust of experienced fighting game players and thereby grow to new audiences as new features and content were added to the game. We also went into this project knowing that a free-to-play game comes with minimum requirements in terms of players to support the game and our ambitions. We quickly saw a number of players connect with the game, and received proof that this approach works, albeit in relatively small numbers (compared to the developer's main game)." They also added, "And while that's exactly what we wanted, it didn't happen in the quantities we needed. Even within the genre, tag fighter players loved the game, but most of the fighting game community didn't find a reason to continue supporting 2XKO."

Later in the announcement, Riot wrote that the developer looked at the game's performance in terms of audience throughout all the recent major updates (the release of quite a few characters), various competitive events, and saw no change in player numbers. And while the developers made some very bold decisions in the past year, another year of development in the current state doesn't seem feasible for Riot, and therefore they reached the decision that the game's development will come to an end this coming December.

The plans for the game's near future include making all characters available to all players without needing to unlock them one by one, canceling the game's competitive mode along with changing matchmaking in casual mode, refunding all players the money they spent on the game in the past year (the option to spend money in the game is now canceled for everyone). The game's next update on September 8 will include a $40 bundle that will contain all cosmetic items in the game including Lux's. The game will also receive Voice Chat and private lobbies that can include up to 40 players. In October, Samira, the final character, will be released. The current competitive season will continue to run until November, and from there on, any private tournament organizer will be able to run their tournaments according to the developer's rules freely online and at local events.

This news is undoubtedly disappointing but not exceptionally surprising, since very quickly after the game's official launch in January, the developer significantly reduced its development team, all leading up to the current announcement that the game will end active development. What does this say about Riot's future with fighting games? Most likely, it's not a particularly bright future. What do you think about this? Still looking forward to Lux next month? Bummed about the game's quick end? Feel free to share with us in the comments!