Riot Games is pulling the plug on active development of 2XKO. The free-to-play tag fighter, in the works in one form or another since 2019 and properly launched less than a year ago, will get its last content patch in October and a final bug-fix pass in December 2026. After that, the team stops working on it.
The blunt version comes straight from Riot's own announcement: "while a lot of you jumped in to try the game and there's an incredible community that plays every day, we haven't seen enough players stick with the game to get to a path toward sustainability."
Lux and Samira still ship
Credit where it is due - Riot is not cancelling the content it already promised. The two champions revealed at Evo 2026 are both still coming, on the schedule they were always on.
Lux arrives with patch 1.3.1 on September 8, described by Riot as "a shoto-inspired character with a simple kit, who harnesses the power of light" - which, in fighting game terms, means she is the one you hand to a beginner. Samira follows in October with patch 1.3.3, a "bounty hunter who fights with bombastic flair, switching between her sword and dual pistols."
Then December brings a bug-fix patch if one is needed, and that is the end of the road for new work.
Everything is being unlocked, and money is being handed back
This is the part that separates a wind-down from a straightforward shutdown, and Riot has gone further than most publishers do.
- Every champion is now permanently unlocked - no grind, no unlock track.
- Most cosmetics have been bundled at $39.99, expanding with each of the two remaining patches to include everything released through Lux and then Samira.
- KO Points purchases were switched off on August 20, the day of the announcement.
- Avatars and profile items are now earnable with in-game Credits, and the 12,000 Credit cap has been removed entirely.
On refunds: PC players get full refunds on KO Points and Starter Edition purchases made before August 20, sent back to the original payment method. Riot says most should land within two weeks, with everything wrapped up by November 2026. Console players go through PlayStation and Xbox rather than Riot directly, and support may reach out to verify payment details. Japan and Korea are being handled separately to comply with local law, with details still to come.
Caitlyn was one of the roster's later additions. Every champion in the game is now unlocked for everyone by default.
The servers are staying on
Worth stressing, because "ending development" gets read as "shutting down" almost every time: 2XKO is not being switched off. Riot's wording is that "servers will remain on beyond 2026, and 2XKO will be playable on all platforms." Offline play is unaffected indefinitely, even in a future where the online side eventually does go dark.
The competitive scene also gets a runway rather than a cliff. Riot is supporting it through November 2026, and has published community competition guidelines so grassroots tournaments can keep running after that on their own terms.
This was telegraphed six months ago
Anyone following 2XKO will have seen the shape of this coming. Riot laid off roughly 80 developers from the project earlier in 2026, saying at the time that overall momentum had not reached the level needed to support a team of that size long term. By March, the game had already dropped off PlayStation's monthly top downloads chart in its first full month on the platform.
Riot's read on why is more interesting than the usual "underperformed" boilerplate. The company says the problem was not that the game was bad but that its appeal was narrow: "even within the genre, diehard tag fighter players loved 2XKO, but most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stick with the game." Content releases were received well. Retention just never moved.
That is a genuinely difficult problem for a free-to-play live-service fighter, where the whole business model assumes a population that keeps showing up. A game can be respected by the people who play it and still not have enough of them.
What Riot says happens next
The team is not being disbanded so much as redirected. Riot's framing: "we'll head back into the R&D lab, where we'll take time to learn and work on how we come back stronger for the next swing at the next genre."
Which is, read plainly, an admission that Riot's attempt to do to fighting games what it did to shooters with Valorant did not land - and that the company intends to try somewhere else. Given how Legends of Runeterra went, "the next swing at the next genre" is a phrase 2XKO's remaining players are entitled to feel a bit cold about.
