What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

In what may have been the slowest-moving and least surprising train wreck of all time, fighting game enthusiasts watched as Riot finally decided to pull the proverbial plug on 2XKO. Or, at least, most of the plug.

Active development will officially end in December 2026. The game itself will remain online afterward, but the towel has very clearly been thrown. Riot is unlocking the roster, winding down most of the game’s live-service systems, and refunding eligible purchases made before the announcement.

So, yeah. Not dead. But maybe gone by Christmas.

I don’t really know what Riot was shooting for in terms of return on investment and longevity, but I imagine 2XKO probably missed the mark on the first and very clearly missed the mark on the second.

The fighting game world is a fickle mistress. Street Fighter and Tekken reign supreme while everyone else fights tooth and nail just for the opportunity to be the fifth-most-popular fighting game on Earth. It’s a wild ecosystem where smaller games shuffle in and out, occasionally catching fire before being replaced by the next shiny thing.

It feels like fighting all season for the final baseball playoff spot just to earn the privilege of getting smoked by the Dodgers.

Sports, amirite fellow men?

Anyway.

If you want my thoughts on the concept of trying to make mountains of money off the back of a free game, I dove much deeper into that in my original 2XKO review. But, short story made long:

How game make money when no charge for game?

Obviously, the answer is cosmetics, battle passes, currencies, and every other little digital trinket developers can attach a price tag to. But fighting games already occupy a relatively small corner of the gaming universe. Building a free-to-play live-service model around that audience always seemed like an enormous gamble.

I’m sure Riot had pie-in-the-sky ambitions about the money that could be made from a fighting game set within the League of Legends universe. But the cracks started forming quickly. Earlier this year, Riot reduced the size of the development team after admitting that the game’s momentum hadn’t reached the level necessary to sustain a team of that size.

At the time, I told some other fighting game enthusiasts that it felt like we were watching the beginning of a rapid unraveling in real time.

I just didn’t realize how rapid it was going to be.

Now we’re entering this incredibly weird holding period where 2XKO becomes a hollowed-out shell of a live-service game. A shambling zombie wandering an empty planet, technically alive but without much of a future ahead of it.

And yet, people are still playing it.

Despite everything, 2XKO has continued to draw respectable registration numbers for EVO France. At one point it sat as the fourth-largest registered game at the event, though the recently released Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls has already surged ahead of it.

That feels like a pretty appropriate picture of where 2XKO currently stands.

It isn’t completely irrelevant. There is clearly still an audience here. There are people who love this game and will probably continue playing it long after Riot stops actively supporting it.

But what version of 2XKO will we see nine to twelve months from now?

Will it continue holding a place at the table alongside the other major games in the fighting game community, surviving entirely because a dedicated group of weirdos refuses to let it die? Or are we watching the last halting, gasping breaths of something whose fate has already been decided?

Time will tell.

But I’m not going to be surprised if 2XKO eventually loses its seat to newer games like Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game and Marvel Tōkon. Fighting games can absolutely survive with small, dedicated communities, but once the company behind a live-service game publicly announces that the numbers don’t work anymore, it becomes pretty difficult to convince new players that this is where they should spend their time.

So now we watch.

Like watching Robert De Niro try to curb stomp someone in The Irishman, I’ll watch through covered eyes with pity, amusement, disappointment, and a little anger.

But I will be watching.