Riot co-founder Marc Merrill says 2XKO needed “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly players just to justify staying alive. Merrill, co-founder, co-chairman, and chief product officer, said that on The Lemonade Stand. The bar was the cost structure, not whether the game looked good. Street Fighter 6 landed about eight years after Riot started on 2XKO. Merrill said that closed the window they thought they had. Not enough players showed up for the live-service plan, so Riot issued full refunds and cut further updates. Active development ends after December 2026. Online play stays up. “We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” Merrill said. For scale, Street Fighter 6 averages about 16,000 to 20,000 monthly users on Steam alone.