Knockout City Going Free-To-Play, EA No Longer Involved

Knockout City, the "dodgebrawl" game from Velan Studios, is becoming a free-to-play game on all platforms later this year with the launch of its newest season. In a blog post, Velan said it's keen to extend the game to a potentially much larger audience around the world by dropping the price of entry to $0.00. The changeover is expected to begin on June 1, 2022 with the launch of Knockout City's Year 2 plans.

Anyone who purchases Knockout City before the changeover in business models will receive a "Loyalty Bundle" that comes with cosmetics, XP boosts, and 2,000 worth of in-game credits, called Holobux.

While this will be the first time Knockout City is completely free, Velan offered the game on Game Pass on day one back in May 2021, and it came to PlayStation Plus in November that year.

Another big change for Knockout City going forward is that Velan Studios will take over as the game's publisher. Previously, Electronic Arts was the publisher. Velan thanked EA for its support over the years, and said self-publishing will help the studio "fully realize" its vision for the game.

"From the day we founded our studio, we’ve worked to deliver revolutionary new game experiences to you, our amazing community of players. We couldn't have introduced Knockout City to the world without the incredible support of EA Originals, but now as we switch to free-to-play, the natural next step is for us to take over publishing responsibilities and work even more closely with our community," Velan said.

"We have exciting plans for Knockout City, and bringing publishing in-house will allow us to fully realize our vision for the long-term future of this game. There's so much to look forward to, because this is just the beginning," Velan said.

Also in the post, Velan said there is still a lot of "behind-the-scenes" work that needs to be finished before the free-to-play changeover, and the developers are now working on that in an "all-hands-on-deck" capacity. Due to this, Knockout CIty Season 5 won't have as much content as previous seasons, and there won't be a new Season 5 Brawl Pass. But this change is only temporary--Season 6 will have a new Brawl Pass featuring new cosmetics to unlock. There are also "plenty of new features" headed to Knockout City in Season 6, including new maps and ball-types.

GameSpot's Knockout City review scored the game an 8/10.

"Knockout City's greatest strengths lie in its simplicity, but also in the ways it remixes traditional multiplayer elements to create something distinct," Alessandro Barbosa said. "Its easy-going nature and straightforward mechanics reduce the time it takes to feel invested in each match, but it's really the subtle complexity underneath that keeps the action engaging and compelling over long play sessions. There's certainly room for improvement with the game's rotating match modes and some of its special ball types, but Knockout City nails the fundamentals to create multiplayer fun that will likely hook you for a long time to come."