The game industry is not the most accessible place to make a living in. First, you have to find a job within the industry that you can do. But, of course, that’s easier said than done. Then, the company you work for has to work hard to make a game that’ll be received well and sell well. If you do one or the other, you likely will succeed and keep making titles. But one of the recent trends is the “live service” games that keep giving you content throughout their lifetime. Knockout City was a title that tried to bank off that, and sadly, it failed.
We know it failed because the game shuts down its servers on June 6th. Certain PC players can still hold matches, but the game won’t get any future updates or content. It’s important to note that Knockout City isn’t the only game in the “live service” market to be shut down recently. Many games have suffered that same fate.
In an interview with GameSpot, the dev team behind the title talked about what the game meant to them:
“This is my favorite game I’ve ever worked on,” game director Jeremy Russo noted. “And it’s also one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. Like, I still play this. And if you talk to most developers, none of them play their own game. But I still have a blast logging in and playing with my friends, grouping up, and going into these brawls.”
Russo also noted that it took six years to get the game to where it was and that the team really grew during that time. He was happy about the initial praise for the game and the community they got with gamers.
So what forced the team to shut everything down? It came down to player numbers:
“We had a strong core community, but a lot of people who really enjoyed the game kind of [just] came through. They may go away for a while, they may come back, but the overall retention rate–which is critical to the heartbeat of any kind of live-service game–has to be at a certain level, month-to-month, to make it make sense.”
The team also admitted the “painful truth” that if you’re not a team of a certain size or ability, trying to make and maintain games like these isn’t feasible. However, they said that “new business models” are likely to develop given all the failures that have been happening.
We’ll have to wait and see if they’re right.
