Riot Games is ending active development of 2XKO, its ambitious League of Legends fighting game, in December 2026. The decision comes less than a year after its full launch, with Riot saying it simply hasn’t seen enough players stick around to put the game on a sustainable path. Importantly, 2XKO isn’t being shut down: its servers will remain online, and the game will continue to be playable.
2XKO isn’t dead… just mostly finished growing
Riot says it spent the past few months tracking 2XKO’s revenue, retention, new-player numbers, and engagement, and while plenty of players gave the game a shot, not enough stuck around. Even efforts throughout the first half of 2026 failed to change that trajectory in a meaningful way. For a game backed by Riot and one of gaming’s biggest IPs, that’s a pretty brutal reality check.
And 2XKO wasn’t exactly a half-hearted experiment. Riot spent years building the 2v2 tag fighter around League of Legends, clearly hoping it could become another major pillar alongside League and Valorant. But apparently, slapping the League name on a fighting game wasn’t enough to turn curious players into permanent residents of the arena.
To Riot’s credit, they will keep 2XKO going through the end of 2026, with Lux arriving in September and Samira in October, followed by a final bug-fix patch in December. All champions will also be unlocked, most cosmetics will be bundled, and eligible purchases made on or before August 20 will be refunded. After that, the servers stay online and offline play remains available, but the game’s growth story is effectively over. 2XKO isn’t being killed; Riot is simply stopping the treadmill and letting the remaining players keep running.
A disappointing ending to an ambitious idea
The fighting-game community’s reaction is understandably mixed. Many players praised 2XKO’s gameplay and accessibility, but questions about long-term player retention, its smaller roster, 2v2 format, and previous development cuts had already been hanging over the game. The frustrating part is that 2XKO isn’t ending because nobody liked it; it simply didn’t attract enough players who stayed for long enough to make the numbers work.
Fighting games are notoriously difficult to sustain as live services, and 2XKO now joins that rather unfortunate club. The game will live on, but Riot’s dream of turning it into the next big fighting-game powerhouse is effectively over before it really got started.
