Riot Games in 2026: Two Giant Hits, One Fighting Game Gone Quiet

On November 14, 2026, the League of Legends World Championship final will fill the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, with Korea's Gen.G facing China's Bilibili Gaming. It will be watched by millions, as it is every year, for a game that came out in 2009.

That is Riot Games in one picture: a company built on a handful of games that refuse to age. It is also a company having a mixed 2026. Its fighting game 2XKO, launched on consoles in January, will stop receiving new content after December, a little under a year later. Here is how Riot got so big, and what this year says about it.

Two friends and a free game

Riot was founded in September 2006 in Santa Monica, California, by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, two friends who loved a fan-made Warcraft III mod called Defense of the Ancients. They raised about $1.5 million from family and angel investors and set out to build a game in the same spirit that anyone could play for free.

League of Legends launched on October 27, 2009, as a free-to-play game paid for by cosmetic items, a model then still unusual in the West. It became one of the most played PC games in the world, especially in Korea and China, and gave birth to one of the biggest esports scenes on the planet.

From one game to many

For a decade Riot was famous as a one-game company. Then it expanded fast. Teamfight Tactics, an auto-battler (a strategy game where your units fight automatically), arrived in 2019. The tactical shooter Valorant launched on June 2, 2020, and quickly became a fixture in esports and in PC bangs. And Arcane, an animated series made with French studio Fortiche, premiered on Netflix in November 2021, proving Riot's worlds could work far beyond games.

The company grew with them, to more than 4,200 employees by 2024. It also hit limits. In January 2024, Riot laid off about 530 people, roughly 11% of its staff, and closed Riot Forge, its label for smaller games set in the League universe.

2XKO: a hard lesson

Riot's newest game was meant to be its next pillar. 2XKO, a free-to-play tag-team fighting game starring League of Legends champions, launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on January 20, 2026.

About three weeks later, Riot laid off about 80 people, roughly half the team, saying the player base was too small to support the game at that scale. On August 20, 2026, it went further: active development would end in December 2026. Riot said simply, "We haven't seen enough players stick with the game."

Riot handled the wind-down more generously than most. It stopped sales of its premium currency, began refunding purchases made before August 20, unlocked all champions for everyone, and put out two final fighters, Lux in September and Samira in October. The servers will stay online, and the game remains free to download on PC and consoles. The last official competitive event is this month.

Hytale's strange journey

Riot's other big setback of recent years has a happier ending, though not for Riot. In 2020 it bought Hypixel Studios, makers of the long-awaited block-building game Hytale. In June 2025 it closed the studio and cancelled the game.

Then, in November 2025, Hypixel's original founder Simon Collins-Laflamme bought Hytale back from Riot. The game went into early access on January 13, 2026, just weeks after the deal, rescued by the people who first dreamed it up.

Why it matters

Riot is a lesson in the power and the limits of a few huge games. League of Legends and Valorant give it stability most studios can only dream of. But 2XKO shows that even Riot, with its famous champions and deep pockets, cannot make players stay. In live-service games, the audience decides.

WGC's take: ending 2XKO with refunds, unlocked content and servers left running is the right way to retire a game, and better than many studios manage. Riot's next test is whether it can launch a new hit at all, or whether its future is League and Valorant for another decade.

What to watch

• The Worlds 2026 final between Gen.G and Bilibili Gaming in Brooklyn on November 14.
• Hoby Darling's first moves as president.
• What Riot builds next, and whether it ever announces the long-rumoured League of Legends MMO.