Riot Games cuts half of 2XKO development team just weeks after launch

Riot Games is slashing roughly 80 jobs from the development team behind 2XKO, its free-to-play 2v2 fighting game set in the League of Legends universe. The cuts amount to nearly half the game's global dev team and come barely three weeks after 2XKO hit its 1.0 release on January 20.Executive producer Tom Cannon confirmed the layoffs in a blog post, saying the game found a dedicated fanbase but not enough of one. "Overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term," Cannon wrote. A smaller team will now focus on "key improvements," with details expected soon.Affected employees will get a chance to apply for other roles within Riot. Those who can't be placed internally will receive six months of notice pay and severance.A decade in the making, struggling in weeks2XKO has had a long road. Riot first teased the project as "Project L" back in 2019, though its origins trace even further to Riot's 2016 acquisition of Radiant Entertainment. After a closed beta, the game entered early access on PC in October 2025 before expanding to consoles last month.The game isn't on Steam, so there's no public player count to scrutinize. But halving a dev team 20 days after a full launch tells its own story.This isn't Riot's first round of cuts either. The company laid off 530 employees in early 2024 when it shuttered its Riot Forge indie publishing label. More layoffs followed that October. CEO Dylan Jadeja has said Riot is shifting toward "fewer, high-impact projects" after several big bets since 2019 failed to pay off.Riot says its plans for the 2XKO 2026 Competitive Series remain unchanged despite the reduced headcount.