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What a week. It was only Tuesday that we wrote about Rumbleverse, a battle royale game that was shutting down less than six months after launch. Now, on Thursday, we’ve got another, only this time it’s Knockout City.
Game director Jeremy Russo shared the news in a blog post published earlier today, saying the game’s servers will be shut down on June 6, and that after that Knockout City “will no longer be playable”. Or, at least it won’t be in its current form (emphasis mine).
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.
While an online game shutting down is always a shame for the community left still playing it at the time, it’s also a reality of this business, even for a game that launched with five million players. When that time inevitably comes, it’s a cruel and disappointing twist that the game usually disappears forever, leaving nothing in its wake except screenshots and memories, and no way for future generations to see what it was all about it.
So the news that Knockout City will be getting a “private server” version on the PC is great, both for fans of the game as well as anyone interested in game preservation (which should be all of you). Russo says this will be “a standalone player-hosted version of the game”, which will be released shortly after the existing version’s shutdown in June.
If you’re a player, the team will be running all kinds of updates between now and June, which you can read about in more detail here.