Riot Games’ co-founder has admitted that 2XKO, the studio’s long-running fighting game project, needed absurdly large player numbers to survive. In an interview with the Lemonade Stand podcast, he said the game required “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly users to justify its live-service model — a threshold he now admits the title never came close to reaching.
The co-founder, speaking about the game’s failure, framed it bluntly. “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” he said. “I think we had a window to do some great things to really help the fighting game community, and then Street Fighter 6 game out, which was 8 years after we started working on [2XKO].” He added that the game “resonated with some players, but not nearly enough players in order to justify the type of live service long-tail approach that the game was designed to do.”
The admission comes with a grim financial context. The podcast’s annotation notes that the co-founder referred to monthly active users (MAU), a metric that measures unique individuals who log in and do something at least once during a month. For a live-service game, that number has to keep climbing month after month to justify ongoing costs.
The Numbers Behind the Failure
Street Fighter 6 currently holds a 30,000 concurrent peak on PC. That figure is notable because concurrent players are the people actually online at any given moment, while MAU counts everyone who logs in at all during a month — a far larger pool.
The co-founder’s estimate of “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly users suggests Riot was aiming for a sustained subscriber base that would rival the largest online games in the world. To put that in perspective, a fighting game with a concurrent peak of 30,000 players would need roughly 100 times that number of monthly active users to meet Riot’s stated expectations.
The analysis offers a back-of-the-envelope calculation to illustrate the scale. If we assume the average person has a seven-hour window to play, with a nine-to-five job or chores on weekends, then about 30-35% of a fighting game’s potential playerbase might be online at any given moment. That puts SF6 at roughly 100,000 people playing the game on PC every day.
Even that generous assumption falls short of the target. The co-founder’s “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” threshold would require a daily active player base many times larger — a number the analysis calls “somewhat desperate.”
SF6’s Player Math
The comparison between 2XKO and Street Fighter 6 is stark. SF6 has sold 7 million units between June 2023 and June 2026. Even spreading those sales across 36 months — an unlikely scenario, since sales are usually frontloaded — would yield just 194,444 potential new players entering the game each month.
The analysis calculates that, even with one of the most popular fighting games in the world, the most generous read on its daily active user count, and the most disadvantageous PC/console split to make the point, SF6 would still barely clear the 500,000 monthly active user mark. That is shy of “high hundreds of thousands,” and far shy of “millions” plural.
| Game | Concurrent Peak (PC) | Monthly Active Users Needed | Sales (2023–2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Street Fighter 6 | 30,000 | High hundreds of thousands, if not millions | 7 million units |
| 2XKO | Not stated | High hundreds of thousands, if not millions | Not stated |
The analysis notes that Guilty Gear: Strive, which is still receiving new characters and updates, has a 24-hour concurrent peak of 1,580. That comparison shows just how thin the player base for a supported fighting game can be while still surviving.
What Went Wrong With 2XKO
The co-founder’s own framing points to several possible causes for the game’s failure. He noted that the game turned into a “box game” instead of a live service, a shift that came alongside layoffs at Riot. The analysis asks whether the company got overconfident from less niche genres, skipped market research, or simply had enough money to gamble on creating something better than Street Fighter 6 — rolling the dice on the livelihoods of the developers building it.
None of those explanations reflect well on Riot. The analysis frames the question bluntly: “None of the answers to those questions are particularly flattering.”
The co-founder’s own words suggest the problem was structural. The game was designed with a live-service model in mind, but it never attracted enough players to sustain that approach. The resonance with some players was real, but it was not enough to justify the long-tail strategy the game was built for.
The Cost Structure Problem
The co-founder’s comments also highlight the financial pressure behind the decision. At their cost structure, he said, the game would have needed “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly users to keep running.
That is a massive demand for a fighting game, especially one competing with a franchise as dominant as Street Fighter. The analysis notes that the MAU metric measures whether a person logged in at any point during the month, which means the daily active player base has to be enormous to move the monthly number.
The co-founder’s team did “great work” and made “a beautiful game,” he said. But the game’s design required a playerbase that simply did not exist.
The Industry Context
2XKO’s cancellation came as a deep frustration, but not much of a surprise given the current nightmare year the industry has been having. The analysis treats the co-founder’s admission as a rare moment of candour. The number “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” is a desperate number, and the podcast’s annotation of monthly active users suggests the question was asked directly.
The co-founder’s own framing is telling. He said the game had an “awesome development team of really talented people.” He said the game “resonated with some players.” He said the game failed to justify its live-service approach.
The Key Figures
The co-founder’s words are the clearest evidence of the problem. “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” he said. The game was ambitious, the team was talented, and the design was built for a future that never arrived.
The co-founder’s admission is a lesson in humility. He said it himself: “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves.” That is a rare and honest statement from anyone in the industry.
The co-founder’s comments are a reminder that even successful companies make mistakes. The difference between a mistake and a disaster is often the size of the audience you are chasing.
The co-founder’s own words are the clearest evidence of the problem. “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” he said. The game was ambitious, the team was talented, and the design was built for a future that never arrived.
Hard Numbers
- SF6 concurrent peak on PC: 30,000
- SF6 sales between June 2023 and June 2026: 7 million units
- SF6 daily active estimate: roughly 100,000 on PC
- MAU threshold for 2XKO: “High hundreds of thousands, if not millions”
- GG: Strive concurrent peak: 1,580
Source material: “Riot needed absurd player counts 'in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions' for 2XKO, dooming it from launch,” PC Gamer.
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