Yet another free-to-play game is coming to closure as Knockout City on Nintendo Switch and other platforms will be closing its doors in June. The game, published by EA and developed by Velan Studio, the team behind Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, reveal that the game will close after Season 9 on 6th June. The team says that the closure of Knockout City was a difficult decision and they are really pleased with what they created. Velan Studios said in a statement on the closing of Knockout City that they promise “you’ll continue to see new and innovative games from Velan Studios that will surprise and delight players around the world.” The news follows the closure of another free-to-play game, Rumbleverse from Iron Galaxy, which will close its doors on 28th February.
“This was an extremely difficult decision for us, but a necessary and important one for our studio. Before that happens, there are a ton of new updates in store. We’ve got a jam-packed Season 9 full of all the amazing new content you’ve come to expect, an epic send-off both in and out of the game, and even a private server version on PC so Knockout City can live on forever. “
“Creating such a different game with no points of comparison and running live services for the first time in many of our careers has also made the past couple years particularly challenging. 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.”
“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 soproud 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, for dedicating your time to talking to us on Discord, Twitch, and elsewhere, for teaching me new tricks in my own game every time you beat me down in a match, and for putting up with me when I’m laying on that Taunt button a bit too much!”
Apex Legends mobile servers will shutdown May 1st as the studio wasn’t able to maintain a good experience. I hope they announce more for the F2p game “Honkai Star Rail” from HoYoLabs the dev’s behind Genshin Impact. No official release date for Honkai Star Rail, but the beta could start as early as February.
Knockout City was really fun, but it definitely struggled to retain players. I’d usually play one hour at most and move on to another game.
One thing I’m certain that affected player count was the migration to Epic. They gave you about a month to migrate your EA account to Epic in-game, otherwise you’d have to do it via their customer service portal. For a game that struggles to stay in everyone’s mind, that was definitely not a good decision. I was really mad that one day I had that Knockout City itch and suddenly my account didn’t exist, and I had to submit a ticket to their portal in order to play the game with my purchases.
Hopefully you can play offline after the servers shut down.
You’d think they would KNOCK it OUT of the CITY but they KNOCKed OUT the CITY.