In the blink of an eye, Riot Games’ 2XKO is closing up shop.
On the company’s official site, Riot says it is stopping active development 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,” the post states.
Servers are expected to remain offline beyond 2026 on all platforms. The rest of 2026 will include content, feature improvements, and two new characters (Lux and Samira). Then, in December, there will be one final bug patch to close things off.
The news that 2XKO is stopping development means all champions will be unlocked, and Riot is bundling all cosmetics and refunding all money spent in 2XKO on or before August 20. Players keep the content they own, and Avatar and profile items can be unlocked using credits beginning in patch 1.3.1 in September.
“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 blog continues.
The whole idea behind 2XKO was that it was meant to be a game that the fighting game community would come to love and play together. So the team set out to tackle issues like reliable netcode, less grindy ranked mode, frequent updates, and more.
On the business side, Riot wanted to make 2XKO free to make the genre more accessible and discoverable for new players. In short, removing gates lets new players experience the genre and fall in love with it.
Riot says it saw the FGC embrace the game early on and saw how players took it to high-level play. It turns out that, as much as the game did well, it still wasn’t enough to keep the lights on for 2XKO. “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.”
Speaking on engagement, Riot says it looked at all the numbers, including revenue and retention throughout 2026. It saw positive player reactions with the releases of Akali, Senna, Thresh, and The Climb (PVE). However, these changes didn’t lead to a meaningful shift in the game’s trajectory.
The team had to consider all available options (e.g., reducing team size, adjusting patch schedules, changing the business model), only to realize it made the most sense to finish the work already started and sunset development at the end of the year.
You can read the patch notes for the rest of 2026 here.
