Whenever I hear that Riot Games, the team behind my favorite videogame of all time, is making a new game, I'm always so ready for it. I'll play anything they want me to, unless it's League of Legends, because I like my social life as it is, thanks. That's why I was surprised that one day in December 2025, I found out that 2XKO had been out for two whole months by that point. Where was the noise? How did it not reach me, given that I'm so active in the Valorant fandom? While its games are pretty wildly different from each other, I get most Riot news on my social pages anyway.
I wasn't the only one who didn't realize the game had come out. On February 10, a fateful day, Riot Games laid off approximately 80 employees, all of whom were associated with 2XKO. The initial reaction that I saw online, apart from 'that's sad', was confusion. I saw tweet after tweet saying things like, 'I didn't even know it had come out' and as user crossknockout eloquently put it, "The amount of people saying they just found out 2XKO released upon reading today's news says it all".
Riot has historically been very good at building hype for its unreleased projects. There's Project T, Project F, and - until recently Project L, which is now known as 2XKO. This is one of the problems I saw cropping up: people knew that Riot had a fighting game coming out - i.e. the company had done enough to promote Project L - but nobody had heard the name 2XKO. Since the layoffs, as people struggle to identify what went wrong, criticisms of the name have been cropping up, alongside suggestions that the marketing went awry.
I do think the name was a factor in 2XKO's disappearance into the void, and I say that even as I swig from my 2XKO-branded water bottle. That not enough was done to let League of Legends and Arcane fans in on the fact that Vi, Jinx, and Caitlyn had been added is also undeniably true. I even think Riot shot itself in the foot by changing Project L from a 1v1 fighter to a 2v2, with some convoluted mechanics. But, primarily, I think one of the main reasons 2XKO couldn't compete is that it was only on PC.
Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Super Smash Bros. - all the classic genre-defining fighters are available on, at the very least, console, maybe in addition to PC. Fighting games feel like they're made for portable consoles like the Nintendo Switch - because of the genre's roots in arcades. It feels more atmospheric to play them on a small screen that you're huddled around, while you're in the middle of a loud conversation over the sound of arcade machines. While PlayStation and Xbox versions are coming, Riot has failed, in my opinion, to respect the roots of the genre, and also didn't recognize the changing market - mobile and portable gaming is becoming more important than ever.
Despite the loss of half the team, I truly believe that 2XKO could find its feet if Riot managed to launch a mobile or Nintendo Switch game. Casual players are what keep funding coming in, and I think there could be untapped potential - with the right marketing, of course. Unfortunately, I think the chances are low now that the team has been sliced up, but I can dream.