![]() ![]() 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’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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We love you all, and we would keep doing this forever with you if we could!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. 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. 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. After two years of live operations, we’ve learned a lot about Knockout City and live games in general. What excites our team the most is making something new, something fun, and something we can learn from. It’s a game that defies any traditional definition, which is what makes it both so amazing and challenging to work on. 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. 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. Velan Studios’ mission is grounded in innovation. ![]() Read on for a full explanation of why we’re making this decision, what it means for you, how it affects the game, and everything you can look forward to over the next few months. 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. Before that happens, there are a ton of new updates in store. This was an extremely difficult decision for us, but a necessary and important one for our studio. 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. Today we are announcing that Season 9 will be Knockout City’s final season. ![]()
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