Live service game Knockout City is closing down in June

Velan Studios has announced plans to close its live service action game Knockout City in June.

The cross-platform dodgeball game was released in May 2021 under the EA Originals publishing label before Velan, which also developed Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, took over publishing duties and made it free-to-play last year.

Launching on February 28, Season 9 of Knockout City will kick off with the release of the game’s final planned update.

All real-money transactions will be removed from the game on this date and the season will last for 12 weeks until the game’s servers shut down on June 6.

Following the shutdown, Velan said it’s planning to release a standalone player-hosted version of the game for PC so that players can continue to play on their own servers.

“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,” the studio said in a blog post announcing the game’s upcoming closure.

“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.

Further reading

Knockout City studio leaves EA behind, will make the game free-to-play

The change will happen as the game celebrates its one year anniversary

“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 very excited about.”

It added: “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.”