On a personal note, announcing the end of Knockout City is a bittersweet moment for me. In his final note, Russo reflects on the journey. Though we’d expect those games will be few and far between. It is worth noting that the team is creating a P2P service so that people can setup their own servers in the future so they can still play. Since the game requires a connection to our servers to function (even for the Hideout and Private Matches) that means the game will become unplayable on all platforms and you’ll be unable to progress past the title screen. Then at 12:00 PM UTC on June 6, 2023, the event ends and all servers will be permanently shut down. Then on June 6th, Knockout City will shutdown permanently. 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. 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. Once complete, a final two-week farewell event titled “Thanks for the KOs” will begin. It will run for 12 weeks and include a number of events featuring new cosmetics, playlists, and more. Knockout City season 9 will kick off on February 28th and will include a wealth of new content. 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. 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. 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. In a heartfelt blog post on Knockout, Game Director, Jeremy Russo, details the challenges for the team and keeping Knockout City relevant in a crowded space.Ĭreating 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. As part of a larger conversation around live-service struggles in the gaming industry, the team at Velan Studios has announced that season 9 of Knockout City will be its last. This one didn’t.And sadly, there goes another one.
We have to figure out the right economic balance to be able to do something new and provide something that’s of real value to players, and then have an economic system that works.
But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s something that we’re not very fond of, and it’ll present a lot of challenges in an emerging sense from a regulatory standpoint as well. Most mobile titles on a global basis, outside of Western markets, also have loot boxes.
“The cosmetics-led games that we know of today and are generally successful, many of them do have loot boxes. So what do you do in that situation? Are there different ways of approaching a premium title with a service on top of that? Are there different types of user experiences that you can have where you can offer gameplay items but not pay-to-win? It’s sort of an all-or-nothing thing, which is a dull view of the world in a sense because it’s like if you want to do something creatively new, it can’t be the right set up in that business model unless you can imagine it being enormous. “A cosmetics-based, free-to-play game, while it’s really appealing to us as gamers, requires massive scale to be economically sustainable.
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