Knockout City will close in June

Velan Studios has announced that it will be retiring its dodgeball multiplayer game Knockout City in June.

The studio announced in February last year that Knockout City would become free-to-play, saying goodbye to Electronic Arts, which originally published the game as an EA Originals title, to self-publish the game’s future content. This free-to-play launch took place last June with the start of Season 6, and now Velan has announced that it will be retiring the game this June. More specifically, Knockout City will close on June 6th.

“Today we announce that season 9 will be the final season of Knockout City,” writes Jeremy Russo, director of Knockout City blog entry. “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 become unplayable.”

Russo writes that the game’s final season will be packed with new content, an “epic farewell both inside and outside the game,” and even a private server version on PC for Knockout City to be enjoyed by hosting players forever their own server.

As for why, Russo writes that Velan learned a lot about multiplayer live-service gaming from Knockout City, and that despite 12 million players and billions of KOs in the game, “there are several aspects of the game that need a bigger break from it.” is better to attract and retain enough players to be sustainable.”

“Being a small indie studio, it’s just impossible for us to make such systemic changes to the live game while still supporting it,” Russo continues. “So we realized we had to step back and pave the way for Velan to do what we do best by innovating.”

Now, Velan plans to apply everything he’s learned over the life of Knockout City to “other games and products that we’re really excited about.” Russo writes that the team is currently in the process of creating a “comprehensive retrospective of every aspect of the game, all of the community feedback and analytics data, and even our development processes” with the hope that “sometime in the not too distant future All of this information can be used to begin work on what’s next in the Knockout City universe.”

On February 28, 2023 Knockout City season 9 will begin with the last scheduled update, version 9.0. Season 9 runs for 12 weeks with six consecutive events featuring some of the studio’s most creative cosmetics yet, fresh new twists on several of fan-favorite playlists, an event focused solely on League Play, and two super-big weeks of Midnight Madness, where the community chooses the two playlists they want to play at the conclusion of the last season. There will also be a new map to accompany the new story of Brawl Pass and Deep Space.

On the same day, all real money transactions will be removed from the game. To compensate, Velan says it’s stuffed every event in Season 9 with rewards for XP, Style Chips, and thousands of holobux. Russo writes that each event will feature a massive sale shop with huge discounts, and almost every cosmetic product the team has developed will make an appearance in the shop at some point in Season 9.

“On May 23, just after our two-year anniversary, Season 9 will end and our final two-week farewell event will begin, which we’ll call Thanks for the KOs,” Russo writes. “This will be one final in-game celebration of Knockout City, with Triple XP, massive rewards, and the return of the community’s favorite playlist, Superpowers: Power Grab. Then, at 12pm UTC on June 6, 2023, the event will end and all servers will be permanently shut down.”

Russo ends the blog post with a big thank you to all Knockout City players, which you can read in full below:

Personally, the announcement of the end of Knockout City is a bittersweet moment for me. While this marks the end of a two year journey for some of you, I and a handful of others on the team have lived in Knockout City for over six years. I’m so proud of the team at Velan for creating such a wild new game with so much critical acclaim at launch, for building a brand new engine from the ground up, capable of doing things no one could other engine can do over the internet and that it created what i think are among the most creative (and fun) cosmetics of any live ops game out there and keep the game running for two years, evolved and improved. I’m also so grateful to all of you, the gamers, for being the most positive and supportive gaming community we’ve ever seen, for spending your time speaking to us on Discord, Twitch and elsewhere, for being the teaching me new tricks in my own game every time you knock me down in a match and for putting up with me when I lay on that taunt button a little too much!

Thank you Brawler for all your passion and support over the past few years. I hope you all enjoy the final season of Knockout City and see you out there!

We really enjoyed Knockout City when we reviewed it in 2021 and gave it an 8.5 out of 10. You can read game informants review right here. We even named it the best sports game of 2021.

The shutdown of Word of Knockout City joins a host of other game shutdown news this week. EA announced earlier this week that Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile will be shutting down, and on the same day Iron Galaxy Studios’ Rumbleverse announced it was shutting down as well.

Hoping into the final season of Knockout City? Let us know in the comments below!