Riot Games Co-Founder Says 2XKO Needed ‘Hundreds of Thousands, if Not Millions’ of Monthly Active Players to Survive

The co-founder, co-chairman, and chief product officer of Riot Games, Marc Merrill, revealed the number of monthly active users 2XKO would have needed to justify its budget, and the eye-popping amount has sparked an animated debate within the fighting game community.

Speaking on The Lemonade Stand, Merrill went into detail about what happened behind the scenes at Riot to cause 2XKO’s catastrophic failure, and provided a ballpark figure of monthly active users the game would have needed in order to justify how much money and time was spent on its development.

It’s no surprise that this figure was, to put it lightly, pretty unrealistic for a fighting game; Merrill said that, considering its cost structure, 2XKO would have needed a player count “in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to rationalize its continued support.

Merrill also mentioned Street Fighter 6, saying the 2023 release of Capcom’s juggernaut title threw off their plans to take a big chunk of …