Devs closing live service games should ‘make a private hosted version’, Knockout City dev says

Developers shutting down a live service game should consider releasing a modified version that supports private servers, according to a Knockout City developer.

Velan Studios director of marketing Josh Harrison made the suggestion during a talk he held at GDC called All Good Things: Sunsetting Your Game the Right Way.

Velan’s cross-platform dodgeball game was released in May 2021 under the EA Originals publishing label before the studio, which also developed Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, took over publishing duties and made it free-to-play in 2022.

The game was then closed down in June 2023, but not before Velan released a Private Server Edition of the game on PC, which is still available to download on its website and essentially keeps the game playable for multiplayer or bot matches, with all previous modes and most (non-licensed) customisation options unlocked.

As reported by PC Gamer, Harrison noted in his talk that while he acknowledged not every studio can carry this out, those who are able to release a private server version of their game should do so when it shuts down.

Speaking of Knockout City’s post-shutdown life, he said: “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.

“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 also explained that making a private server version of a game is a “relatively light lift” for most studios, given that development builds of the game behave “very similarly to how a private server build would”.

He concluded: “If you take one thing away from this talk, this is it – make a private hosted version of your game. It is the single biggest thing that we did to impact the positive reception of the sunset.

“It got great press, got great reactions from players, and ultimately, it keeps the game that everybody at the studio worked so hard on alive forever, even with the live servers offline.

“In our case, we were only able to do it for PC players for a few different reasons but it still did the job that we wanted it to, and due to some extremely light analytics hooks in it, we still see people playing it every day even nine months later.”