Riot Lays Off Roughly 80 2XKO Devs Less Than a Month After Launch

Riot's 2v2 tag fighting game 2XKO came out on January 20th of 2026. Three weeks have currently passed since release, and Riot has just announced that they are laying off roughly 80 developers from the 2XKO development team.

Riot shared these news via a blog post written by Tom Cannon that goes into the reason behind this decision. According to Tom, the issue stems from 2XKO failing to attract a significant audience.

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While "reducing the size of the team" is rather vague, a Riot spokesperson told Game Developer that these cuts include approximately 80 employees. While we don't know how many people exactly work on 2XKO, this is a very significant number of workers to cut off all at once.

From posts on social media, we also know that these cuts affected pretty much all levels of development, including leading roles. These layoffs have so far included:

• Patrick Miller - Game Designer and Senior Producer
• Josh Jodoin - QA Engineer
• Jason Wang - Member of gameplay analysis team
• Dustin Carey - QA Manager
• Alex Jaffe - Lead Champion Designer
• Chioke Blacksheare - Game Designer
• Meghan Guo - Champion Engineer
• Caroline Montano - Champion Gameplay Designer
• Chris "Chemical Hypeboy" - Senior Systems and Gameplay Designer
• Sarah Tudor - Game Producer of Stages
• David Bolton - Senior Character Artist
• Stuxnet - Staff Engineer
• fooey - Senior Marketing Writer
• Jonas Kazan - Concept Artist
• Aleyna Norton - 3D Character Artist
• Caitlyn Cirigliano - Game Producer and Production Coordinator
• Thomas Huynh - Gameplay Animator
• Tyler Godette - VFX Artist
• Aaron Harris - Live Balance Team and QA Engineer

The blog post attempts to reassure readers that this isn't the end. Rather, a shift in how they operate with a focus on "sustainable path forward." However, it's hard to see a bright future for the game when Riot is already turning its back on their developers and slashing major positions.

Pat has been at the company for over a decade, and Caroline Montano designed most of the game's roster. If they are removing people who did so much, what could they possibly plan for the future of 2XKO? How is it meant to gain or even maintain momentum when talented staff members are told to find jobs somewhere else?

This sustainable path forward is looking a lot of like "maintenance mode," similar to how Legends of Runeterra, Riot's attempt to capitalize on the popularity of digital CCGs, was put on life support after similarly failing to gain much momentum on launch.

There is no denying that 2XKO had a seemingly troubled journey throughout its lifespan. It began development ten years ago when Riot acquired Radiant, a company that only made a city builder that didn't fulfill its Kickstarter promises, and Rising Thunder, an unfinished simplified fighting game.

However, the full scale production didn't start until much later, when they finally settled on the game's direction and style roughly 5 years ago. Since then, 2XKO was constantly followed with doubt. The premise of the game is not exactly something that sounds like it would make for a big hit.

Tag fighters are a niche sub-genre for a reason. People who love it expect complex mechanics, expressive combos, many unique interactions, robust movement options, and the ability to pull off incredibly nuanced offense sequences. This is not a sub-genre that appeals to casual players, yet it's the one Riot chose to capture the wider audience.

With many community veterans on the development team, they very much delivered a very deep tag fighter, which is a big part of why quite a few Marvel, Skullgirls, and DBFZ players resonated with it. It was also nice looking and relatively intuitive enough to attract some new players to fighting games, but while trying to appeal to both extremes, they seemingly attracted little more than the tiny overlap between two Venn diagrams of casuals and hardcore players.

Perhaps the game could still do well if it was given more post-launch support, better marketing, and enough time to expand its roster, but right now that seems out of the picture.