Why the Riot MMO survived the purge when Hytale did not

Riot Games bought Hypixel Studios in April 2020, funded Hytale for five more years, and cancelled it in June 2025 with about 150 people laid off. Two months after that, Riot was still hiring for an MMO it had announced in 2020, had nothing to show for, and had restarted from the design up the year before.

Same company, same eighteen months, same pressure. One project cut, one project kept. Nothing Riot has said about the Runeterra MMO is as informative as that comparison, because a company reveals its priorities in what it stops funding, not in what it praises.

The purge, in order

The sequence is short and severe.

On 22 January 2024, Riot cut 530 jobs, about eleven per cent of its staff, and closed Riot Forge, the label that had published six smaller Runeterra games in three years. Chief executive Dylan Jadeja wrote that Riot had made "a number of big bets" since 2019, that there were now "too many things underway", and that some bets "aren't paying off". He added that the company was not doing this "to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number", which, for a company wholly owned by Tencent, was probably true and did not make the cuts smaller.

Over the same period Legends of Runeterra was reduced to its single-player mode, Path of Champions, with a smaller team.

In June 2025, Riot cancelled Hytale before launch and closed Hypixel Studios. The property was later sold back to Hypixel's founder, and the game resumed development elsewhere, which is the clearest possible statement that Riot's objection was to funding it, not to its existence.

On 9 February 2026, three weeks after 2XKO launched, Riot laid off about 80 of its developers, roughly half the team, saying the game had "resonated with a passionate core audience" but that "overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term". Around twelve publishing roles went the same month. On 20 August 2026, Riot announced that 2XKO would move to maintenance mode in December, with the servers left on.

Across 2023 to 2026, the count is about 608 people.

The exception

The MMO sat inside every one of those decisions and came out of each one intact.

It was the largest unshipped bet on Jadeja's list in January 2024, and it was not cut. Two months later it was reset, which is what you do to a project you intend to finish and are unhappy with, as opposed to a project you intend to stop. Marc Merrill's reset post asked for years of silence so that the team could do "the incredible amount of work ahead of them", and a company that plans to cancel something does not plan its workload.

Then it was staffed. Orlando Salvatore in November 2024, Raymond Bartos in January 2026, Brian Holinka in June 2026: three senior World of Warcraft veterans, the last of them hired four months after the 2XKO layoffs and eight months after Hytale's cancellation. We go through them in the WoW all-star team. Hytale was cut while the MMO's producer was being hired. 2XKO was halved while the MMO's combat designer was being recruited.

And it was protected from the top. Merrill told Game File in February 2025 that it was "probably the project I personally spend the most time on", and is reported to supervise its executive producer directly. No other Riot project has a co-founder attached to it that way.

Why, in our reading

Four reasons, in decreasing order of confidence.

The genre matches the company. Riot's stated strategy since January 2024 is to concentrate on its live games: League, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, Wild Rift. An MMO is the most live of live services, a game designed to be played and paid for across a decade or more. Hytale was a creative sandbox with an uncertain audience. 2XKO was a fighting game, a genre with a devoted but bounded following. The MMO is the one unshipped project that fits the shape of the games Riot chose to keep.

The horizon is long on purpose. In December 2022, Riot's finance chief wrote to Intrepid Studios that Ashes of Creation could "remain popular for decades", and proposed to buy the studio for a reported $250 to $500 million. The deal failed, as we describe in when Riot offered up to $500 million for Ashes of Creation, but the reasoning is on the record: Riot values MMOs as thirty-year assets, the way it values League. You do not cancel a thirty-year asset because 2025 was a bad year.

The audience is already measured. The streamer Asmongold put the MMO announcement's video views at 138 million in seven months, a figure Sportskeeda reported and Riot has never confirmed or corrected. Riot does not need a market study to know that a Runeterra MMO has a customer base; it has better numbers than that, and it has not shared them. Hytale's audience was a projection. 2XKO's turned out to be smaller than its team.

Merrill wants it. This is the least analysable reason and possibly the strongest. A co-founder's personal project survives budget reviews that a division's project does not, and the MMO has been Merrill's since Street left in 2023.

Why survival is not health

The argument above should not be read as reassurance, and two things cut against it.

The first is that the same criterion that ended 2XKO, momentum insufficient to justify the team's size, is one the MMO will face at every milestone. The reset was itself a judgement that the first version did not justify shipping. A second such judgement is possible, and it would arrive the same way the first did: after the fact, briefly, from Merrill.

The second is that the MMO has cost more than any of the projects Riot cut, in time if not in money. Six years without a public build is expensive in a way that does not appear in a headcount. Riot has shown it will write off five years of Hytale. It has not yet shown whether it would write off six of this.

What it has shown, so far, is the opposite. Every point at which the MMO could have joined the list of closures, it was reset, staffed, or defended instead. That is the strongest evidence available that the project is real, and it is evidence of exactly one thing: that Riot has not stopped. Whether the question of cancellation is settled, and what would change our answer, is in is the Riot MMO cancelled?. The wider record is in everything we actually know.