There’s been a lot of news about the shutdown of live service games, knockout city and crossfireX is the most recent title added to the heap.
Earlier this week, Velan Studios announced that its dodgeball game Knockout City will end after Season 9, with global servers shutting down on June 6. Announcing the news in a blog post, Velan Studios wrote: “This was an extremely difficult decision for us, but one that was necessary and important to our studio… despite having over 12 million players worldwide. and billions of KOs, but several aspects of the game need significant disruption to better attract and retain enough players to be sustainable. As we are a small indie studio, it is impossible for us to continue Making these systemic changes to live play while supporting the game.”
The post goes on to explain that, having taken all of this into consideration, it’s taking a step back and will use what it’s learned to “explore new possible experiences for Knockout City and other games and products.” An important thing to note is that as of February 28th, all real money transactions will be removed from the game, so you won’t be able to buy Holobux, the Deluxe Bundle, or either of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Bundles on any platform. But Season 9, which launches on the same day, will have plenty of XP, style chips and “thousands of Holobux” to make up for.
On PC, there will be at least a private server version of the game, so it will still be playable in some form, but only if you have friends playing with you. Smilegate’s CrossfireX is different, which also announced it will be shutting down later this year.
Smilegate also announced in their own blog post this week that CrossfireX will no longer be supported from May 18th. All sales on the Xbox Store have stopped, and there are no plans to add more content to the game. If you made your purchase in the 14 days before February 3rd, you may be able to get a refund, so it’s worth checking to see if it’s available.
Control developer Remedy is also the team behind the CrossfireX event, which will also stop streaming from May. The current state of live service gaming is pretty good, and paints a not particularly pretty picture for anyone outside of Fortnite.
