Back in 2019 Riot announced a fighting game called Project L, which would later be renamed 2XKO. Released into early access on PC in late 2025, it hit consoles in January 2026.
We should note the game was only announced in 2019; it had been in development much, much longer, as a Game Developer story from September 2025 reports. That piece, which interviews Riot Games senior game producer Patrick Miller, says the "nearly" ten years of work (by September 2025) put into 2XKO "was vital to make sure the game isn't KO'd in round one", that "it takes a lot of time and effort to unpack the 30+ years of lessons that the veteran [fighting game] studios have learned", and that "I often remind my teammates that it took seven Tekken games (and two Tekken Tag games) to get to Tekken 8."
Today, just three weeks after the game was released on console, Riot announced that "roughly" 80 members of the development team are being let go because, in Riot's words, "the game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term."
UPDATE 9:30pm ET: Miller posted earlier today on social media that he was one of the affected.
While work on the game will continue, the layoffs and statement make clear that whatever "passionate core audience" the game has found, it's nowhere the size Riot leadership were hoping for or expecting, which is weird considering they supported development for a decade to make sure the game wasn't "KO'd in round one", only to throw in 80 towels before it has even been out (formally at least) for a month.
Riot says the affected developers can either find work elsewhere within Riot or, if that's not possible, will be given "a minimum of 6 months of notice pay and severance".
