Riot Games scraps Smash Bros rival fighter and fans are outraged

Riot Games has discontinued development on its Smash Bros.-style fighting game, codenamed “Pool Party,” leaving the community disappointed.

Insiders close to the project have confirmed that Riot Games will no longer be producing the game, with a team of 70-80 developers being removed from the project. According to a source familiar with staffing decisions at Riot, about half of the team has been offered reassignment within the studio, while the rest are currently seeking new positions.

Pool Party was a fighting game similar in style to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. in which characters from different universes battled each other. The premise was well-suited to Riot’s diverse roster of characters from League of Legends, Valorant, and the Netflix series Arcane.

“We always have a number of projects in various phases of R&D, and spinning projects up and down happens multiple times a year,” said Joe Hixson, senior comms director at Riot Games, in a statement.

Riot has been working on expanding its gaming universe for the last few years by creating mobile games, a card game title, a first-person shooter, and a 2v2 fighting game that is closing in on a release date.

Pool Party’s cancellation comes from the executives seeing failed projects in a similar style, most notably Warner Bros’ MultiVersus. 

Initially envisioned as a hardcore fighting game, the concept of Pool Party evolved during development to incorporate party game elements and casual-friendly mechanics. This shift in scope and vision allegedly led to frustration among some team members.

The project’s halt has disappointed the developers and fans of Riot’s franchises, who have expressed their dismay at the news on X. 

“It would’ve been cool, but I guess it makes sense that Riot didn’t go further since they have 2XKO,” said one commenter.

Others shared a similar sentiment, saying that Riot’s work on a Smash Bros. title would have been fun to play. However, not everyone was convinced that Pool Party would have been a hit when it competed with one of the biggest titles in gaming. 

“Even if you’re Riot, the sentence ‘a new platform fighter to compete with Melee’ automatically spells doom for your game. Melee players want to play melee. If you want your platform fighter to do good, then you make one targetting the non-Melee audience,” one commenter pointed out. 

It is unclear how far into production Pool Party was, as most of its information was left unknown to the public. As Hixson stated, multiple projects that may or may not see the light of day are being evaluated each year.