Knockout City developer Velan Studios announces that its next seasonal update will be the game's last. Velan Studios is promising its Season 9 content will send Knockout City off with a bang and celebrate the players before servers shut down later this year.
Knockout City, the fun re-imagining of dodgeball where an entire city is a playground, was released in May 2021 as part of the EA Originals program. The colorful multiplayer title was well received in the initial months after release and is still generally heralded as a good game. Unfortunately, the accolade, good word-of-mouth, and shifting to a free-to-play system in June 2022, could not prevent it from suffering the same fate as other smaller, live-service titles.
In a blog post on the Knockout City website, Game Director Jeremy Russo announced that Season 9 of the free-to-play multiplayer game will be the last wave of new content for the game. Knockout City public servers will shut down on June 6, 2023, a little over 2 years after the game launched. Russo praised the work and creativity of the developers and the Knockout City players that stuck with the game. Knockout City had crossovers with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, introduced many new maps, balls, and playlists, and released 8 seasons of quirky cosmetics that fans enjoyed. Despite these things, the challenges of maintaining a live-service game were too much for the independent, self-publishing Velan Studios to continue to endure.
Season 9 content for Knockout City will start on February 28 and will be 12 weeks long, leading into a final event before the servers shut down. There will be six events within that time that will bring new twists to current playlists and a final Midnight Madness event that will have the Knockout City community choose the final 2 playlists before the servers shut down. With the start of Season 9, all "real-money" in-game purchases will be removed. In its place, Season 9 XP, Style Chips, and Holobux rewards will be plentiful and there will be a huge sale on shop cosmetics. There is a small glimmer of hope for some Knockout City fans: Velan Studios is working on a private server for PC players that want to keep playing after the June 6 sunset date. The Private Hosted Server will be a standalone download for PC players to host games with friends or join other player servers.
The "Thanks for the KOs" event will start on May 23 and reward players with triple XP, the return of the Superpowers: Power Grab playlist, and other rewards. This event will run until the June 6 shutdown date and the game will be unplayable once the clock hits 12:00 pm UTC (7:00 am EST.) Velan Studios will be taking the lessons it learned from Knockout City and hopes to apply them to other projects and leaves the door open to another iteration of Knockout City in the future if things go well for the game developer.
Knockout City is available until June 6 on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
