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I find myself pretty gloomy about the shutdown of 2XKO—but not because I’ll miss it on a personal level. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to training-montage myself into a serious fighting game player other than a few stints with Guilty Gear: Strive, but I did have a reasonable time messing around with 2XKO during its beta. And while I’m aware my lack of continued playing makes me part of the problem, I genuinely felt a little sad to see it sink into the waves as Riot announced it was winding down development.
But I’m also feeling blue for another reason. While I don’t necessarily blame Riot for not wasting money in this quarterly-results-driven culture of ours, I also really don’t think this sort of attitude helps me believe in the vision of its upcoming MMO, whose details are wrapped in the mists of a development mirage.
Riot laid off most of its developers less than three weeks after 2XKO’s release—roughly 80 people. People like Patrick Miller, an amazing steward of fighting games who’s written a book on the genre. The fact it’s shutting down the game less than a year after that “inspired” (these air quotes are so heavy) move speaks to me of a corporate impatience that MMOs seriously struggle to survive. As Raph Koster told me this year in our Terminally Online column, MMOs have become incredibly expensive.
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MMOs are costly to run and take a long time to get cooking. The continued success of everything that isn’t WoW (which found major success right away and sat fat and glad for years) isn’t due to some goldrush mentality, but because they’ve been steadily sustained for over a decade—once you get a solid playerbase, an MMO will keep breadwinning for you for years to come. But they’re a commitment.
And commitments are something Riot seems flighty about making. I couldn’t tell you about the numbers behind the screen—we know that 2XKO was making “only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability”—but might that have had something to do with the 80 people punted from the project less than a month after launch?
Is there a world in which Riot Games didn’t do that, and instead gave it a chance to grow its playerbase with a more active development team? Is there a world in which Riot—who let’s not forget, was able to throw $250 million at Arcane—could have comfortably tanked those losses to give it a chance at success?
More importantly, is there a world in which an MMO survives without that patience? There’s every chance I’m calling a shot long before it’s made, mind. Fighting games are a bit of a niche genre due to their high skill floor and astronomical skill cieling—even my game of choice, Strive, has a 24-hour peak of 1,700 players on Steam, as does Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a game that’s ostensibly new.
Which for the most part isn’t a problem if you’re building for it. Fighting games don’t need high populations to stay “active” because they’re 1v1 experiences—I’ve literally never had an issue finding ranked matches in Strive, for instance. But if you’re Riot, and you’re comparing every videogame you have to your League of Legends moonshot, I can imagine any number without several commas in it won’t satisfy you.
Who knows. Riot’s currently-unknown tolerance for mid-range hits might be perfectly comfortable if its MMO pulls in, say, a few hundred thousand players. The studio might also be betting far more money on its MMO’s success, and thus be less likely to cut and run—but it’s not as if MMOs are any less of a competitive or brutal market, with very few new entries in the past few years having the staying powers of their predecessors.
Even if Riot finds success, that’s not an indicator it’ll survive—take New World, which Amazon somehow managed to mess up despite having 10,000 concurrent players at the end of 2025. By live service standards, that’s perfectly sustainable, but by MMO standards it clearly wasn’t enough—which bodes ill. Consider me biting my nails.
