Knockout City is the next game in line to shut down their servers.

Announced today, the game’s servers will shut down on June 6. Fortunately, players will get one last season before its all over. Season nine will kick off on February 28, and it’ll run for 12 weeks. On May 23, the game will kick off a two-week farewell event. After the official servers go offline, however, PC players can continue the fun on their own private servers with a standalone player-hosted version. More information about this version will be released soon.

This week, Apex Legends Mobile, Love Live! School Idol Festival, and Rumbleverse announced they were shutting down servers in the following weeks.

A statement from Knockout City game director Jeremy Russo reads:

Today we are announcing that Season 9 will be Knockout City’s final season. 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. This was an extremely difficult decision for us, but a necessary and important one for our studio. Before that happens, there are a ton of new updates in store. 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. 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.

Velan Studios’ mission is grounded in innovation. 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. 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. It’s a game that defies any traditional definition, which is what makes it both so amazing and challenging to work on.

What excites our team the most is making something new, something fun, and something we can learn from. After two years of live operations, we’ve learned a lot about Knockout City and live games in general. 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. 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. We love you all, and we would keep doing this forever with you if we could!

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 will be a whole new map to accompany an entirely season-themed Brawl Pass and Deep Space Dispatch storyline! The full announcement for Season 9 will come in a few weeks, and we can’t wait to share that with you when the time is right.

Also starting on February 28, all real-money transactions will be removed from the game. You will no longer be able to purchase Holobux, the Deluxe Bundle, or either of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Bundles on any platform. To make up for this, we’ve packed every event in Season 9 with rewards for XP, Style Chips, and thousands of Holobux. Every event also features a massive sale shop with huge discounts, and almost every cosmetic we’ve ever sold will make its way into one of these sale shops. The rewards for League Play, Daily Login Bonuses, and the Brawl Pass have also been drastically increased, and the price of the Premium Brawl Pass will be reduced to just 50 Holobux (which you can easily earn in the Free Pass)!

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. 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. Then at 12:00 PM UTC on June 6, 2023, the event ends and all servers will be permanently shut down. 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.

During this final Event, Knockout City celebrations are also taking place outside the game! This includes giveaways galore, a huge, final tournament for our competitive players, some new merch that looks back on the amazing years of Knockout City, a final season of Deep Space Dispatches we’ll be releasing in a new podcast feed to wrap up the story, and a bunch of other surprises! Best of all, we’ll be releasing a standalone player-hosted version of the game for Windows PCs. Even after the official servers go offline, Knockout City can continue to be played for eternity by fans that want to host their own servers! We’ll have more details about all of the events and this final version of the game soon, so be sure to stay tuned over the weeks ahead.