Velan Studios has announced that their multiplayer dodgeball battler Knockout City will be shutting down on 6th June 2023, with Season 9 to be the game’s final season as a live service. However, the game will be able to live on, as the company will enable the ability to play with private servers on PC after their own have gone offline.
Knockout City Season 9 will still launch on 28th  February and will be a 12-week season with six events running back-to-back, as well as a new map themed on the Brawl Pass and Deep Space Dispatch storyline.
On 23rd May, just after the two-year anniversary of the game’s launch, Season 9 will end and a two week farewell event will take place, with XP bumps, rewards and the Superpowers: Power Grab playlist returning. Then, on 6th June, the servers will be flipped offline and the online-only game will be dead.
Except for the Private Hosted Server edition of Knockout City. This will be made available as a free, standalone download for Windows PC. It will be an entirely separate version of the game that you can use to host matches for friends or to join another private server. The major downside is that none of the live game progression will carry forwards, though Velan will have more details about what is included closer to its release.
Game Director Jeremy Russo explains the reasoning, that “Despite over 12 million players and billions of KOs around the globe, there are several aspects of the game in need of major disruption to better attract and retain enough players to be sustainable. Since we are a small, indie studio, it’s simply impossible for us to make those kinds of systemic changes in the live game while continuing to support it. So it became clear to us that we needed to take a step back and pave the way for Velan to do what we do best by innovating.”
Russo continued, “On a personal note, announcing the end of Knockout City is a bittersweet moment for me. While this is the end of a two-year journey for some of you, I and a handful of others on the team have been living in Knockout City for over six years. I am so proud of the team at Velan for creating such a wild new game with such critical acclaim at launch, for creating a brand new engine from scratch that’s capable of doing things no other engine can do over the internet, for creating what I think are some of the most creative (and hilarious) cosmetics of any live-ops game on the market, and for keeping the game running, evolving, and improving for two years straight. I’m also so grateful to all of you, the players, for being the most positive and supportive game community any of us have ever seen.”
The studio is now doing a full retrospective and will feed everything they’ve learnt from running a live service game for two years. Knockout Studio launched in 2021 with the backing of EA Originals as a publisher. An innovative team dodgeball battler, the studio had built it around homegrown technology, not too dissimilar from rollback netcode, to ensure low latency and fair fighting, though it came with the questionable business decision of being a paid game in a time of free-to-play (albeit with a launch onto EA Play and Xbox Game Pass). On its first anniversary, the partnership was over, and Velan took over the publishing of the game, shifting business models to be free to play.
Knockout City is currently available across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
Source: Knockout City
