Riot Co-Founder: 2XKO Needed Millions of Players to Survive

Riot Games co-founder, co-chairman and chief product officer Marc Merrill has put a number on what it would have taken for 2XKO to survive, and it has fighting game fans arguing.

According to Merrill, the League of Legends-based tag fighter needed "hundreds of thousands, if not millions" of monthly active players to justify the investment Riot had poured into it. He framed the target as the baseline for a project of its size and ambition, not a stretch goal.

The remark has landed hard in the fighting game scene, where most of the genre's long-running pillars operate on far smaller player bases. Titles that the community considers healthy and successful often sit well below the range Merrill described, which has led many players to question whether Riot's expectations were realistic for the genre in the first place.

Others see the comment as an honest look at the economics of a big-budget live-service fighter. Riot built 2XKO with a large team, a free-to-play model and long-term support plans, all of which carry ongoing costs that a niche audience alone struggles to cover. From that angle, the number is less a criticism of fighting games and more a reflection of how Riot measures success across its portfolio.

The debate also highlights a broader tension in the genre. Fighting game communities have long celebrated tight, dedicated player bases and strong tournament scenes, while publishers backing expensive free-to-play projects tend to look for mass-market reach. 2XKO sits right at the intersection of those two worlds, and Merrill's comment makes the gap between them hard to ignore.

For now, the discussion is playing out across social media and community forums, with players split between those who say the target was never attainable and those who believe a different launch strategy could have helped. Riot has not laid out a new numbers-based goal, but the co-founder's candor offers a rare glimpse at the scale the studio was aiming for.