The writing was on the wall for Riot Games’ free-to-play League of Legends fighter, 2XKO, when the development team was drastically reduced just weeks after launch.
In a new post, Riot Games has said that all active development on the game will end this year. Here is part of their statement:
“2XKO’s 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.
Servers will remain on beyond 2026, and 2XKO will be playable on all platforms. Through the rest of 2026, we’ll be introducing content, feature improvements, and two new champions (Lux and Samira), with the intent to deliver our final bug fix patch in December of this year. After that, servers will remain on to support online play. Offline play is unaffected. We’ll give advanced notice if any of that changes.
We’re unlocking all champs. We’re also bundling most cosmetic items, and refunding all money spent in 2XKO on or before August 20. Any content owned is yours to keep. Avatar and player profile items will be unlockable for Credits. This will happen in patch 1.3.1 (September). More info on this below.
Our goal now is to do right by the players who have invested in us so far and want to continue playing 2XKO, as well as the Rioters who have poured everything into delivering on this dream. The rest of this post goes into detail on how we got here, what’s changing, and what’s still to come.”
They go on to explain what they tried to do, but why they ultimately failed.
“Early on, we saw pockets of the FGC fully embrace 2XKO, and we got proof that this approach was working at a small scale: players pushed the game to its limits in high-level play (and brought their non-fighting game friends to play with them); duos became a great way to mash buttons together; tournament organizers added the game to their weekly lineups; and players told us they just wanted more (champs, events, features, etc).
While this is exactly what we wanted to see, 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.”
You can read more about Riot Games’ plans for the rest of the year, including how they will handle refunds, here.
Source: Riot Games
