Riot Games has now confirmed that active development on its fighting game 2XKO will conclude in December 2026 , less than a year after the title's full launch . We already had an inkling this might happen when the developer laid off half the team that worked on the game because its momentum was slowing.
Servers will stay online, and the game remains playable for free on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X, but no further champions, seasons, or major content updates are planned beyond a final bug-fix patch. It's a familiar story for a studio that has struggled to turn ambitious new IP outside League of Legends into lasting live service hits, and even more familiar story for live service games as a whole (even Guerrilla Games apparently decided to rework Horizon Hunters Gathering after negative feedback).
Riot says the decision on 2XKO came down to retention numbers that never trended toward sustainability , despite well-received champion launches like Akali, Senna, and Thresh throughout 2026. The studio is refunding all KO Points and Starter Edition purchases made before August 20, unlocking every champion for free, and bundling most cosmetics into a one-time $39.99 purchase . Two final champions, Lux and Samira , will still arrive in September and October before the game enters a purely maintenance state, with Ranked Mode, Battle Passes, and seasonal content all being stripped out entirely.
Riot was explicit that this wasn't a snap decision : the team considered shrinking headcount, changing the patch cadence, or reworking the business model before concluding that finishing existing content and stepping back from active development was the best route forward.
2XKO's wind-down fits into a run of retreats from Riot's attempts to diversify. In January 2024, the company laid off 530 employees, roughly 11% of its workforce, and shut down Riot Forge , its indie publishing label responsible for single-player League spin-offs like Ruined King , Convergence , and Song of Nunu . That closure came after just six released titles and roughly five years of operation.
A restructuring also hit Legends of Runeterra , Riot's digital card game launched in 2020 to compete with Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering Arena. Riot didn't fully cancel it, but drastically shrank the development team and pivoted focus almost entirely to the single-player Path of Champions mode after acknowledging the game hadn't performed as well as it needed it to. The competitive PvP scene was effectively deprioritized soon after.
Around the same period, Riot also quietly scrapped its planned Riot Esports Network , a streaming platform meant to rival Twitch, just days after the layoffs were announced. And in June 2025, Riot canceled Hytale , the Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG it had acquired back in 2020, eventually selling the project back to its original developers months later. Hytale later launched in early access this past January .
Riot's own explanation for 2XKO points to a structural problem the company has now hit multiple times: launching a free-to-play, live-service game requires a minimum sustained playerbase to justify ongoing investment, and niche genres have consistently fallen short of that bar compared to League of Legends and Valorant . Riot acknowledged in its own post that diehard tag-fighter players loved 2XKO, but most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stick with the game.
Riot has signaled it isn't abandoning experimentation altogether, saying it will " head back into the R&D lab " to prepare for its next attempt at a new genre. But with Riot Forge, Legends of Runeterra's competitive scene, the Esports Network, Hytale, and now 2XKO's active development all falling by the wayside within roughly two and a half years, the company's track record outside its core three titles remains rocky at best.
Personally, I really hope the next one doesn't suffer the same fate. I'm talking about the League of Legends MMO , which was confirmed all the way back in 2020 but got rebooted in 2024 . With the exception of ArenaNet's recently announced Guild Wars 3 , it's the only triple-A MMORPG in development by a Western studio. If Riot got it right, it could revitalize a dying genre ; here's hoping.
About the author : With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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