Six months after laying off approximately 80 developers because "overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term," Riot Games has announced that it is ending development of its fighting game 2XKO. Servers for online play will remain available and the game is also playable offline, but "active development will conclude at the end of 2026."

"Over the last few months, we've been monitoring 2XKO's trajectory closely, and what we've seen is painting a clear, consistent picture: while a lot of you jumped in to try the game and there's an incredible community that plays every day, we haven't seen enough players stick with the game to get to a path toward sustainability," Riot wrote in today's update.

New content will continue to flow through the remainder of the year, including two new fighters, along with new bug fixes and "feature improvements" leading to a final bug fix patch in December. All fighters are being unlocked, and any money spent on the game "on or before August 20"—that's today—will be refunded.

PC Gamer's fighting game pro Mollie Taylor wrote in February, shortly after the layoffs, that she didn't understand what Riot wanted from 2XKO, a question today's end-of-development post tries to answer. The short version is that it wanted "to build a game that the fighting game community would love to play with their friends," addressing what it saw as shortcomings on both the technical and business fronts—and while the studio saw evidence of success, "it just wasn't happening enough. Even within the genre, diehard tag fighter players loved 2XKO, but most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stick with the game."

The bottom line is that while Riot's efforts through the first half of 2026 were well received, "we saw no meaningful, sustained change in 2XKO's trajectory; only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability." Thus, the plug is pulled.

A League of Legends fighting game might seem like an obvious idea, but it was something of a bold gambit. It was built to be a 2v2 "assist fighter" game right out of the box, and Riot poured years of work (and money) into getting it right: Speculation that it was working on a fighting game goes back to at least 2017, but it wasn't officially confirmed until 2019.

Two years and many iterations later, it finally got the 2XKO title, and went into full release in January 2026. 2XKO isn't on Steam so we don't have access to player numbers, but the dramatic reduction in the team size just a few weeks after release indicated that they were not up to Riot's expectations. The studio said in February that it was still "fully committed" to the game, but now it's seen enough.

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The untimely end of 2XKO sucks, but Riot is at least trying to give players a soft landing: Today's announcement includes a roadmap for the remaining updates, and Riot said it's "figuring out what more we can do for players, TOs, competitors, and creators that have consistently shown up for the FGC through 2X."

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.