Merrill Says 2XKO Wasn't a Mistake. He's Half Right

Riot doesn't miss often, which is exactly why it's worth studying the tape when it does. At a PAX West 2026 panel, co-founder Marc Merrill talked about 2XKO for the first time since development on the tag fighter was wound down, and his line was clear: "I wouldn't characterise 2XKO as a mistake."

His framing of why it didn't work is the interesting part. "You're not just competing against games, you're competing against everything," Merrill said, arguing that a free-to-play title is really fighting for people's attention and time - a brutally high bar in a market where more than 20,000 games hit Steam every year. Per his telling, 2XKO simply never reached the critical mass a live-service fighter needs to sustain a community. He also pointed back to the origin story: he and fellow co-founder Brandon Beck met EVO founders Tom and Tony Cannon and saw a genuine opening in the competitive scene. The team, he said, delivered a beautiful game that took risks with its tag system.

All of that is true. It's also only half the story.

The queue is the content

Fighting games are the one genre where player count isn't a vanity metric - it IS the product. Nobody labs combos for a game where ranked queue takes four minutes at EU evening peak. Below a certain population, matchmaking quality collapses, the skill spread per lobby gets absurd, and every loss feels random. That death spiral has killed better-funded projects than this one.

And 2XKO walked into it carrying the heaviest backpack in the genre. Tag fighters are the hardest possible on-ramp: you're not learning one character, you're learning two, plus assists, plus synergies, plus a doubled matchup chart. League of Legends and Valorant succeeded because they entered genres with a massive casual funnel and let depth reveal itself slowly. A 2v2 tag fighter front-loads the complexity on day one. Veterans already had Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 eating their ranked hours; newcomers bounced off the wall. That's not TikTok stealing your players. That's the genre's own onboarding problem, unsolved.

So when Merrill says 2XKO was competing against everything, I'd narrow it: it was competing against its own learning curve, and lost.

Still, I'll give him the last point without irony. A company publicly saying a failed swing wasn't a mistake matters, because the live-service graveyard is teaching studios the opposite lesson - ship safe, clone what works, never risk a mechanic. That lesson is worse for players than any single shutdown. 2XKO died; the willingness to try a tag system at that scale shouldn't die with it.

Image: TarkusAB / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GameCube_arcade_stick.jpg