Dodgeball game Knockout City will be unplayable from June 6 on official servers

Velan Studios, the developer of Knockout City, which will be released in 2021, will close the servers of the dodgeball game on June 6. This ends the game, which will no longer be playable via the official servers from that moment on.

The studio announces on its site and via a video quit the game. With all global servers shutting down on June 6, the curtain falls just over two years after the game’s release. The makers say it was an “extremely difficult decision,” but also a “necessary and important one” for the studio. The game will still be playable after June 6 via the special Private Hosted Server version of the game, although this version has yet to be released and this is only for PC and not for the other platforms.

Jeremy Russo, Knockout City’s game director, said in a statement that the live service element, in addition to the decline in popularity, contributed to the game’s closure. “Creating such a different game and keeping live services running for the first time in many of our careers has made the past few years especially challenging. Despite over 12 million players and billions of Knockouts around the world, there are several aspects of the game that need a big change to attract and retain enough players to be sustainable.Being a small indie studio, it’s simply impossible for us to make that kind of systemic change to the live game while we remain it to support.”

The ninth season of the game will start on February 28 and it will be the last. This season lasts twelve weeks and will end on May 23. This is followed by a farewell event that lasts for two weeks. As of February 28, all real money transactions will also be removed from the game. This means that certain bundles can no longer be purchased.

Season 1 of Knockout City came out on May 25, 2021; few days before was the official release of the game. Within two weeks, the game already had five million players. The game was free to play for the first ten days and then until Street Rank 25 was reached. It originally came out under The EA Originals label, but the game hasn’t been published by EA since June last year; from then on, Knockout City became free-to-play. Data from SteamDB shows that the game has not been very popular for quite some time; A few months after release, player numbers plummeted fairly quickly, and so did after the short-lived peak when the game became completely free.

Knockout City is a multiplayer game in which players compete against each other as a team. The game revolves around throwing, catching, passing and dodging a ball. Characters that don’t have a ball in their hands can turn into a ball. A teammate can then pick it up and throw it at the opponent as a bomb.