EA has decided that to make Velan Studios' Knockout City's population alive and active, the game has to go free-to-play.

After fumbling and failing to make any mainstream breakthroughs for a year now, EA has made the decision to make the dodgeball-based 3v3 multiplayer game free-to-play. Knockout City hasn't made enough buzz to attract migrants, and the game has been rather lackluster over the past year. Hence, the game will now be free-to-play as soon as Season 6 rolls out, which is on June 1, 2022. Upon going free-to-play, the game will leave EA Play. Players who already purchased the game or got the game when it was offered through PS+ would be able to receive a Loyalty Royalty Bundle, which contains exclusive legendary cosmetics, XP boosts, and in-game currency. It also appears that players will be able to play Knockout City online whether or not they are subscribed to the PS+ service.

Knockout City experimented with a demo-first, pay later model, where players were free to try out all of Knockout City's features for a few hours, before locking the entire game behind a paywall once the timer runs out. On top of this, the game also featured microtransactions for cosmetics and emotes. These would have potentially earned both Velan Studios and EA a lot of money, had the game appealed more to the mainstream audience. However, many people decided not to even try the game when they found out about the play timer, and thus the game alienated more people than it actually attracted with its promotional system.

Now, roughly a year later, EA is ready to take up the battle once again. Hedging their bets on peoples' penchant for anything free-to-play, they hope that this lowering of the entry barrier would help revitalize the Knockout City community and player base. Let's hope for the best for this move, especially since the game itself is fun to play both alone or with friends. We don't get a lot of good dodgeball games, so it'd be sad to see service for this game to die out if it really couldn't find any audience.