'Make a private hosted version of your game': Knockout City dev's top tip for studios shutting down a live service game is to give players the keys
No «live service» game lives forever, or in the euphemistic language of the games business, they all get «sunsetted» eventually. At a GDC talk this week, Velan Studios director of marketing Josh Harrison implored other developers to prepare for that inevitability, ideally by doing the thing we also hope they'll do every time: making their games available to play even after the official servers are unplugged.
Harrison was in charge of marketing for competitive dodgeball game Knockout City. We loved the game, which we awarded a 90% in our review, but even after going free-to-play, it struggled to retain players. Velan Studios shut down Knockout City's servers two years after it launched.
To buoy dev team morale and avoid being scorned by fans, Harrison recommends making a big celebration out of the sunset rather than trying to minimize the news. Knockout City's end was announced with a video message—Velan recorded multiple versions in case the news leaked early, which it did—and included a $25,000 tournament (which in hindsight, they might've scaled back), a two week in-game event, a limited edition art book and vinyl soundtrack, and more.
There's one thing, however, that Harrison recommends studios do above all others when sunsetting a live service game: let players keep playing the game on their own servers. Before shutting down Knockout City, Velan released the game as a standalone Windows executable with private server support. It's still available to download.
«There are small but mighty communities that are still going, built around this private server months after shutdown by playing games daily, hosting their own tournaments where they're raising their own prize pools, and more,» said Harrison. «One community member even built a launcher that makes it easier to get into private servers as well as see a private server list of active player counts.»
Harrison acknowledged that the feasibility of releasing a standalone client will vary between games and studio
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