Riot needed absurd player counts 'in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions' for 2XKO, dooming it from launch

2XKO ending its development (which Merrill phrases here as turning it into a "box game" instead, despite the fact Riot also laid off a bunch of people to make that happen), came as a deep frustration, but not much of a surprise given the current nightmare year the industry's been having. However—that number, "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions", is a somewhat desperate number.

Especially given the podcast has an annotation of monthly active users (MAU), which one'd assume would mean they asked Merrill for clarification. An active user is a unique user that logs in and does something at least once during a month, which means that the number would be far higher than concurrent users (how many of those users are logged in at any one time).

However, we can at least make some very loose guesstimates. Street Fighter 6 has a 30,000 concurrent peak on PC at the time of writing. …