Marc Merrill – one of the co-founders of Riot Games and its current CPO – has spoken about the in-development MMO, describing it as “the grail” following the sudden end-of-development announcement for its fighting game 2XKO.
Speaking at Pax West 2026 with Greg Miller, Merrill spoke for around an hour about Riot Games’ history and future projects. This included a brief exchange around its in-development MMO at the studio, as well as the soon-to-be shuttered free-to-play fighting game Riot released earlier this year.
“We know what players’ hopes and dreams are,” Merrill said. “It’s just on us as a team and as people to succeed in the execution. What a worthy quest. We jokingly call it the grail internally because we’re like ‘f*ck it, many a brave knight are going to die’.”
“But f*ck it, it’s the grail so lets go. That’s the mindset that we really try to cultivate, but it’s really hard to do at scale. But I think we’re doing a reasonable job and the future is incredibly bright.”
This MMO, which has yet to be given a name (even a known project name), a release window, or even a confirmation on what sort of MMO it will be, has been in development for some time. Initially under the watchful eye of former Blizzard lead Greg Street, who left the company back in 2023, the project restarted development in the past few years. Merrill has previously said the game will be out before 2030, but precious little else about the project publicly.
This statement received an interesting response online. While some expressed excitement around the project despite the crumbs of information out there, many are skeptical of the project given the recent end-of-service announcement for its recently released fighting game 2XKO. A rising sentiment appears to be ‘how can we trust this game will stick around?’
“They hyping up this MMO like they aren’t just going to shoot it in the face after six months cause it won’t be bigger than WoW,” writes user Sloth on X. Another user, Red Riot Ross echoed similar sentiments, writing: “The only thing 2XKO sunsetting has done for riot is give laughably bad optics on anything they do/make going forward.” Tsuki, another X user, posted: “Wait till they hear how FF14‘s first 3 years went,” a reference to the rocky start Square Enix‘s MMO had before the game’s rise to popularity with the ‘A Realm Reborn’ mulligan.
There are others expressing frustration at the lack of information out there about this much-hyped MMO, another parallel to 2XKO which spent a lengthy portion of its almost 10-year development time in the dark. One member of the public Snowbird wrote: “Almost seven years since they announced they were working on an MMO and we don’t have a screenshot, a piece of concept art, nothin.” Enderspider feels similarly, writing: “I know it’s a lot of work building an MMO but it’s kinda wild how we have genuinely not seen or heard anything about it besides ‘we’re building an MMO’ despite them having worked on this for five years already now. Nothing. No snippets, no teasers, no concept art, not even a name.”
Merrill did speak about 2XKO while at Pax, emphasising he “wouldn’t characterize 2XKO as a mistake” despite its short life span. “One of the challenges with free-to-play games and the live service model in general… Unless you do something so incredible in a really competitive world where 20,000+ games are published a year on Steam, and there’s an infinite amount of social media content, and an infinite amount of stuff to watch on YouTube, what we’re doing is competing for people’s attention. That’s a really high bar.
“You have to do so many things right to get enough critical mass to build the community and have it turn into something and be sustainable in the long run,” said Merrill. “2XKO unfortunately didn’t do that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great game. That’s why we’re refunding. It’s also why we’re keeping the game live. It doesn’t mean the intention to serve the fighting game community was not utterly in the hearts of the Cannons, and the Rioter’s, and us the entire time.
“We’re not gonna bat 1,000, but that doesn’t mean we’re not proud of it, and it doesn’t mean we’re not going to take big swings. That’s another thing, I know a lot of other people are like ‘oh my god I’m concerned about what this means for all sorts of other games’, and it’s like, well you shouldn’t be. If there’s one thing about Riot, [we have] an unquenchable desire to serve and make it better, and we’re constantly trying to find ways to do that. We’ve got a lot of cool things in the pipeline.”
Riot Games appears to have found itself in an interesting spot. While 2XKO is the latest in its stumbles as a massive live service games company, it is not the only one it has had to contend with. The digital card game Legends of Runeterra faced a similar fate to 2XKO back in 2024, the company cut its indie publishing label Riot Forge back around the same time. Its top-down action game Project F, which we only saw once alongside the would-be 2XKO many years ago, hasn’t been seen since. While the company still has League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and the newly popular Riftbound TCG out and about, it’s got far from a spotless history.
The pressure is on then, to prove not only that this upcoming MMO (whatever it is) can stand up in a fiercely competitive genre and be supported for the long haul. Whether Riot Games can do that remains to be seen, as does the game itself.
