Riot Games Cancels Smash-Style Fighting Game

Riot Games has reportedly been working on a fighting game that's similar to Super Smash Bros, which has now been cancelled. The reason might surprise you.

League wallpaper
The cast of League of Legends would lend itself well for a Smash-style fighting game. | © Riot Games

Riot Games is known for dabbling in many different game genres. League of Legends is a MOBA, Valorant a first-person shooter, and Legends of Runeterra is a strategic card game.

So it's not impossible to think that Riot could pull off a platforming fighting game like Super Smash Bros. But now the developers have stated that the project is cancelled.

Smash-Style Fighting Game Cancelled Because Of MultiVersus

The journalist Mikhail Klimentov stated that approximately 80 people were working on the game, codenamed "Pool Party".

It was supposed to become a hardcore fighting game, but more and more party game elements were added to it during development.

2XKO
Riot's other fighting game is called 2XKO | © Riot Games

Now the project has been put on ice, because Riot developers were scared by the release failure of MultiVersus. They said that they liked the game a lot, but after it came out and felt like "just a beta" it lost a lot of its player base. MultiVersus relaunched and gathered 110,000 players, but those numbers didn't really stick.

Currently, less than 5,000 people are playing MultiVersus on Steam.

Another reason why Riot could have stopped "Pool Party", is their other fighting game, 2XKO, which will probably release officially in 2025.

Benedikt Ostertag

Benedikt is one of our new writers here at EarlyGame. He makes music and loves playing video games. His favorite games include Super Smash Bros, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring and League of Legends. His other great passion is anime, which he also loves to write about....