Knockout City to shut down in June

Over the past few days, a whole slew of games have been announced to be shutting down. This trend seemed to kick off when Rumbleverse announced its closure, and since then a bunch of EA projects have bit the dust as well, including Apex Legends Mobile, which isn't even a year old at this point. So, it should come as much less of a surprise that Knockout City will also be shutting down this year, with servers closing in June.

Developer Velan Studios has announced that Season 9 of the game will be its final one, and that on the morning (likely the afternoon for us in the UK and Europe) of June 6, 2023, the game will close its servers.

The announcement blog post calls this decision a "necessary and important one for our studio", and then later goes into a bit of extra depth, with Velan adding:

"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."

As for what Season 9 will bring, we're told that this will be a 12-week season that starts on February 28, 2023, and that it will feature six back-to-back events, alongside new cosmetics, twists on gameplay, a new map, and more. Needless to say, this will be one hell of a send off.