League of Legends Spinoff Cancellation Leaves Players Fuming
Riot Games has announced it is ending active development on 2XKO, its League of Legends-themed fighting game, just eight months after the title officially launched. The decision has prompted an angry backlash from players and fighting game community figures, who accuse Riot of abandoning the project prematurely and prioritising profit over long-term community building, with some warning it could damage investor confidence in the wider fighting game genre.
A final content patch will arrive in October, with active development ceasing in December, though servers will remain online and any in-game purchases made before 20 August will be refunded. Riot said it had seen "no meaningful, sustained change" in the game's trajectory towards sustainability despite updates, following earlier layoffs that cut half the development team in February. Critics have pointed to a lengthy development cycle since the game's 2019 reveal as Project L, a launch roster of only ten characters, costly monetisation including a roughly $100 skin bundle, poor marketing and an unclear title as contributing factors, drawing comparisons to the similarly troubled free-to-play fighter Multiversus.
- Riot Games is ending active development on fighting game 2XKO after 8 months.
- Final patch lands in October; pre-20 August purchases will be refunded.
- Players and streamers slam Riot, citing prior layoffs and poor game support.
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Riot Games' fighting game 2XKO is a spin-off of its hugely popular League of Legends franchise, letting players control familiar characters in one-on-one combat rather than the team-based strategy of the original. It launched in full only in late 2025, after several years of testing under the working title Project L, and is free to play, making money instead through optional cosmetic items and character bundles.
Riot is the games studio behind League of Legends, one of the world's most-played online games, and has used that success to branch into other genres, including a card game and an animated series. The fighting game genre itself has a small but devoted following, and 2XKO was seen as a major test of whether a big publisher could sustain a serious, ongoing entry in that space, rather than treating it as a side project.
The decision to scale back development so soon after launch matters because it raises questions about how much backing large companies are willing to give niche genres once a game fails to take off quickly, and about the wider financial pressures facing games studios even when their parent franchise is thriving.