Developer Velan Studios has announced that its live service game, Knockout City, will shut down its servers on 6 June 2023 after struggling to retain a sustainable player base. The game originally launched in May 2021 and despite enjoying some initial success with millions of players, it quickly lost steam in the community.
Velan Studios published a statement explaining why it’s choosing to shut down Knockout City. The studio acknowledged the dwindling player base and noted that it struggled to sustain enough players to keep the game going. However, it also mentions that the task of developing new content at a rate that players were satisified with became “simply impossible.”
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Knockout City game director Jeremy Russo explained in the statement:
“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.”
Velan Studios is set on looking back at Knockout City, seeing what worked and what didn’t, then taking those lessons and applying it to a new project. It seems unlikely that a sequel to Knockout City would be on the table at this point as the studio would probably want to move onto a new original IP instead.
Two weeks before the game shuts down forever, Knockout City will run an event called “Thanks For The KOs” celebrating the game and the players. A triple XP bonus will run throughout those two weeks so players can earn rewards much faster. It will also see the return of the Superpowers: Power Grab playlist.
Additionally, the in-game store will be shut off on 28 February, the same day it will receive its Season 9 update.
Console players will be completely shut out of Knockout City when it goes offline on 6 June, but PC players will still be able to download a version of the game that will be playable through individually hosted servers.
Sadly this marks the crash of another live service game as the market becomes flooded with options. It was inevitable that some might get scrapped when players move onto other titles. Very few continue to find success but in the case of Knockout City, it lived and died by its player count.
Source: Velan Studios
