On The Lemonade Stand podcast, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill stated:
"We only have ourselves to blame, right? I believe we had the opportunity to achieve something meaningful and truly contribute to the fighting game community, but Street Fighter 6 launched officially—by which time we had already been developing 2XKO for eight full years. Our development team is excellent, filled with talented individuals who produced impressive work, resulting in a high-quality game.
"...While the game did garner some player affection, its user base was far too small to support the live-service model originally designed for it... Given their cost structure, sustaining long-term service would require MAU to reach at least the hundreds of thousands, if not millions."
2XKO has ceased development (Merrill framed it as a pivot to a "premium buy-to-play game," but in reality, Riot laid off numerous employees to facilitate this shift). This disappointed many players, though given the tough industry climate this year, it wasn't entirely unexpected. However, the requirement for "hundreds of thousands, even millions" of players seems quite unreasonable.
Notably, the podcast specifically labeled this figure as Monthly Active Users (MAU), which was likely confirmed by Merrill with the show's hosts. MAU refers to unique users who log in and perform at least one action within a month, a number significantly higher than Concurrent Users—the number of players logged in at any single moment.
However, we can at least make a rough estimate. At the time of writing, Street Fighter 6's peak concurrent players on PC stood at 30,000. Assuming an average person has 7 hours of available gaming time per day, and considering typical 9-to-5 jobs or weekend household and social commitments, concurrent player numbers wouldn't fluctuate drastically.
In other words, at any given moment within a 24-hour cycle, online players account for approximately 30%-35% of the total potential player base. The rest are either sleeping, working, or handling daily chores. Based on this calculation, the number of stable daily PC players for Street Fighter 6 is roughly 100,000.
I must clarify: these are definitely not precise figures, merely napkin-math estimates—assuming Street Fighter 6 players are evenly distributed across time zones and share similar daily routines. But lacking official MAU data from Capcom, I have no choice but to extrapolate based on available information.
Let's calculate generously again, assuming only 25% of players are on PC (the actual percentage is likely higher; I'm being intentionally conservative). That brings the total 24-hour player count to just 400,000. Since MAU only tracks whether "a person logged in this month," if Street Fighter 6 had no new player influx, the daily total of 400,000 players would contribute very little to boosting MAU figures.
This means that to approach nearly a million monthly unique players, a significant influx of new or returning players is required daily. Between June 2023 and June 2026, Street Fighter 6 sold 7 million copies. Even if we evenly distribute these sales over 36 months (which is unrealistic, as sales typically concentrate shortly after launch), the potential new players per month would only be around 194,400.
In other words, even taking one of the most popular fighting games globally and estimating DAU generously while deliberately downplaying the PC share to support the argument, the MAU barely exceeds 500,000. It barely meets the "hundreds of thousands" threshold, let alone reaching millions.
Compared to other fighting games still receiving continuous updates, this requirement appears even more impractical. Guilty Gear -Strive- continues to release new characters and updates, yet its 24-hour peak concurrent player count is only 1,580.
Simply put: 2XKO could never reach the expected player scale, leaving many questions behind. Did Riot become overly arrogant due to successes in non-niche genres? Did they skip market research entirely? Or was the 2XKO development team simply inefficient?
Or perhaps, like many studios before them, they simply gambled with ample funding, hoping to create something superior to Street Fighter 6—betting developers' livelihoods in the process? None of the answers to these questions are particularly flattering.