“Even though it's anyone can get in and play, it's not well understood. “The messaging was just a bit complicated,” he said.
#KNOCKOUT CITY TRIAL FREE#
So that wasn't really a flow for player liquidity.”īala also admits that the free trial, though a good idea, could have been better explained. When we go to Latin America or most of continental Europe - UK is a bit stronger on the Xbox side - or Japan, Xbox at that time, was definitely underindexed quite a bit.
“But it was not as prevalent in other parts of the world. “Game Pass was helpful in North America, where we continue to have pretty decent player liquidity and a premium model,” Bala explained. Bala admits that while Game Pass helped make Knockout City popular in some parts of the world, this was far from a universal phenomenon. But it was not as prevalent in other parts of the world" "Game Pass was helpful in North America, where we continue to have pretty decent player liquidity and a premium model. So that's plenty of play for players coming in and seeing if they like it.”
#KNOCKOUT CITY TRIAL TRIAL#
And then we offered a free trial afterwards with a level cap of 25, which would give on average about five hours. That would provide a certain level of player liquidity for Xbox users. “So we made it a Game Pass at launch title, which is a little uncommon for EA Play type of products. “We still needed a way for our players to come in with low friction,” Bala continued. But the Velan team had now seen the benefit of letting people play for free, so continued to do this after Block Party with both a free trial and other subscription services.
The Block Party idea was a hit, helping Knockout City hit five million players by the time the event came to a close. We had this premium model, we had to bring down the barriers as much as possible to try it.” So we came up this mantra, together with EA, that playing is believing. “One of the hardest things we've found is that if you write the concept of a game, like 'I've got a game about dodgeball' and you say here's what you do, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and it doesn't scream 'awesomeness.' Frankly we put it in front of people and they said it could be interesting, but they don't know what it meant. “We had to launch it at mid-price premium but we also had to one make that price barrier as affordable as possible so we went to this $20 price point that we thought was going to be effective, but then make it as easy as possible for people to get in and try it,” Bala explained. This saw users being able to play Knockout City without paying for ten days. The Velan team settled on a $20 price tag for the game, but wanted to court an audience that was growing more and more accustomed to such an experience being free-to-play with its Block Party launch event. But by the time release was approaching, many of these titles had shifted to being free-to-play, while new and similar games had launched with this model. There were numerous examples of this kind of experience on the market, including Overwatch. Knockout City was always going to be a multiplayer-only game, he told us. Once again, Bala took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss how Knockout City's first year in the wild has been, what Velan has learnt from the experience and what the future holds for the dodgeball multiplayer romp. This was the culmination of almost four years of work in the wake of the Bala brothers founding Velan Studios in 2016 following their exit from Activision Blizzard's Vicarious Visions. Just weeks after the studio's president Guha Bala appeared at GI Live: Online back in May 2021, the company released its second title, Knockout City. It's been quite the year for developer Velan Studios.
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