As early as 2019, Riot announced a fighting game code-named Project L, which was later officially named "2XKO". The game will enter early access on the PC platform at the end of 2025 and will be launched on the console platform in January 2026. According to foreign media reports, although the game was announced in 2019, its development cycle was actually much earlier.
According to a September 2025 interview, Riot senior producer Patrick Miller said that the team had been working on 2XKO for "nearly a decade," which was crucial to ensuring the game "wasn't a first-turn knockout." He also mentioned that the field of fighting games has accumulated decades of design experience, and new teams need to spend a lot of time understanding and digesting it. He took the development history of the "Tekken" series as an example, emphasizing that excellent works often require multiple generations of iterations.
However, just three weeks after the console version launched, Riot announced that it would be laying off "approximately 80" members of the development team. The company explained that while the game did attract a "passionate core of players," the overall momentum wasn't at the level needed to maintain the current team size.
Later, Patrick Miller also confirmed on social platforms that he was one of those affected by the layoffs.
Although Riot stated that the development of "2XKO" will continue, this decision is in sharp contrast to the previous nearly ten years of development investment, and has also triggered discussions about the gap between the project's performance and expectations.
For laid-off employees, Riot said they can try to find other positions within the company; if they are unsuccessful, they will receive "at least six months" notice period salary and compensation.
