Velan Studios revealed their quirky competitive dodgeball game, Knockout City, will shut down on June 6.
While season nine will be the last, Velan Studios revealed what players can expect going forward.
Today we are announcing that Season 9 will be Knockout City’s final season. Then, on the morning of June 6, 2023, over two years after our initial launch, all servers around the world will be shut down and the game will no longer be playable. 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.
There’s a lot of information to share about Knockout City’s final months which we’ve included in a FAQ at the end of this blog, but here are the high-level details: On February 28, 2023, Season 9 of Knockout City kicks off with the release of our final planned update, version 9.0. This will be a 12-week season, with six back-to-back events featuring some of our most creative cosmetics yet, fresh new twists on several of our best playlists, a whole event focused exclusively on League Play, and a super-sized two-week Midnight Madness where the community will pick the two Playlists they want to play to close out the last Season. There will be a whole new map to accompany an entirely season-themed Brawl Pass and Deep Space Dispatch storyline! The full announcement for Season 9 will come in a few weeks, and we can’t wait to share that with you when the time is right.
Also starting on February 28, all real-money transactions will be removed from the game. You will no longer be able to purchase Holobux, the Deluxe Bundle, or either of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Bundles on any platform. To make up for this, we’ve packed every event in Season 9 with rewards for XP, Style Chips, and thousands of Holobux. Every event also features a massive sale shop with huge discounts, and almost every cosmetic we’ve ever sold will make its way into one of these sale shops. The rewards for League Play, Daily Login Bonuses, and the Brawl Pass have also been drastically increased, and the price of the Premium Brawl Pass will be reduced to just 50 Holobux (which you can easily earn in the Free Pass)!
On May 23, just after our two-year anniversary, Season 9 ends and our final 2-week farewell event begins, which we’re calling Thanks for the KOs. This will be one final in-game celebration of Knockout City, featuring TRIPLE XP, massive rewards, and the return of the community’s favorite playlist, Superpowers: Power Grab.
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The same blog post detailed the reasoning behind ending Knockout City.
Velan Studios’ mission is grounded in innovation. For Knockout City, we set out to make something fresh and fun, starting with just those initial ideas of third-person dodgeball, throw-catch rallies, and balling up to become the weapon. Through relentless iteration and experimentation, we got to the experience you know and love today, seamlessly blending half a dozen different game genres from shooters to sports games, fighters, brawlers, platformers, and physics simulations. It’s a game that defies any traditional definition, which is what makes it both so amazing and challenging to work on.
What excites our team the most is making something new, something fun, and something we can learn from. After two years of live operations, we’ve learned a lotabout Knockout City and live games in general. It’s been a truly rewarding experience growing the game each season, talking to the community, trying new things, creating content that makes us laugh, and best of all, having a blast playing the game ourselves! Over the course of development and live-ops, we created an original IP, built a brand-new game engine, self-published when we went free-to-play, and created over fifty Playlists, eleven maps, a dozen balls, and almost three thousand different cosmetics. A ton of love, passion, and hard work has gone into Knockout City, and our amazingly positive and dedicated community of players has made it well worth the effort. We love you all, and we would keep doing this forever with you if we could!
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. Now we can take everything we learned, everything that succeeded and everything that needs improvement, and get to work on exploring new possible experiences for Knockout City and other games and products we are veryexcited about. We’re currently in the process of doing a comprehensive retrospective on every aspect of the game, all the community feedback and analytics data, and even our development processes. Our hope is that sometime in the not-too-distant future, all this information can be used to start work on what comes next in the Knockout City universe. While we can’t promise that Knockout City will be back, what we can promise is that you’ll continue to see new and innovative games from Velan Studios that will surprise and delight players around the world.
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, 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!
Thank you, brawlers, for all your passion and support these past few years. I hope you all enjoy the final season of Knockout City, and I’ll see you out there!
Jeremy Russo
Game Director of Knockout City
Voice 1 in Brawler Customization
Crew Captain of Team FEAR
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While this is disappointing news for some, the PC version of Knockout City will be updated to allow for private servers. This will allow the experience to live on after June 6 if anyone so chooses. Along with that, Velan Studios talked about plans to celebrate the experience they created, and the fans that supported them.
During this final Event, Knockout City celebrations are also taking place outside the game! This includes giveaways galore, a huge, final tournament for our competitive players, some new merch that looks back on the amazing years of Knockout City, a final season of Deep Space Dispatches we’ll be releasing in a new podcast feed to wrap up the story, and a bunch of other surprises! Best of all, we’ll be releasing a standalone player-hosted version of the game for Windows PCs. Even after the official servers go offline, Knockout City can continue to be played for eternity by fans that want to host their own servers! We’ll have more details about all of the events and this final version of the game soon, so be sure to stay tuned over the weeks ahead.
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