Merrill Says 2XKO Needed Nearly 1 Million Players, Possibly More, to Survive
He also described conflicting leadership goals and said Street Fighter 6's 2023 launch closed the release window he saw for the fighter.
Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill says 2XKO needed “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly players to sustain its planned live-service model at the game’s cost structure. He described the project as “too expensive, too big a team” during the Lemonade Stand podcast.
Host Aiden “Calvin” McCaig asked what player count would have made the investment worthwhile. Merrill gave a rough survival threshold, not a report of 2XKO’s actual audience.
Merrill traced 2XKO’s origins to the idea of building on Rising Thunder, a 1v1 fighter from Radiant Entertainment. The concept combined approachable controls with room for mastery, the League of Legends universe, the Cannon brothers, and a Riot-style competitive ecosystem.
Development also faced internal disagreements, Merrill said. Changes in leadership and differing goals left the team without an aligned strategy, while developers heard conflicting direction about how the project should proceed. Merrill accepted responsibility for the breakdown, saying Riot had “no one else to blame but ourselves.”
He also said Street Fighter 6’s June 2023 release closed a window he believed 2XKO could have used to make a bigger impact on the fighting game community. The game arrived about eight years after work began, but Riot still chose to release it. Merrill said the development team had done good work and Riot had already communicated its plans to players.
2XKO resonated with some players, Merrill said, but not enough to support the long-term live-service approach the game was built for. On August 20, Riot said active development will end in December 2026 while 2XKO remains online and players receive refunds.
PC Gamer’s rough comparison with Street Fighter 6 starts with a roughly 30,000 concurrent-player peak for the PC version at the time of writing. Assuming a seven-hour daily play window and estimating that 30 to 35 percent of the potential audience is online at a given moment produces roughly 100,000 daily PC players. A deliberately low assumption that PC accounts for 25 percent of the total audience would then put the estimate at about 400,000 daily players across platforms.
The 25 percent PC share is treated as conservative, with the comparison pointing to a r/Fighters discussion about PC and console player counts. Monthly active users count people who log in at least once during a month, not everyone online at the same time, so the 400,000 daily-player estimate would translate to a similar monthly figure only if those players were largely the same people returning regularly.
The calculation also uses Capcom’s report of 7 million Street Fighter 6 units sold between June 2023 and June 2026. Dividing those sales evenly across 36 months comes to about 194,444 copies per month, although units sold are not a count of active players and sales are usually front-loaded.
Under those assumptions, the comparison puts Street Fighter 6 just above 500,000 monthly active users, still below the high-hundreds-of-thousands threshold Merrill described. It also cites a 1,580 concurrent-player peak for Guilty Gear: Strive over 24 hours, even as that game continued receiving characters and updates. Neither that peak nor the rough Street Fighter 6 calculation establishes 2XKO’s actual audience, and the underlying measurements are not interchangeable.
Do Merrill’s threshold and the rough Street Fighter 6 comparison make Riot’s target look realistic, or do they leave too much uncertainty around platform mix and retention? Follow us as 2XKO moves toward its planned December 2026 development cutoff on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.
