More About the Epic Migration!

*Update: As of Patch 8.1, the migration period for signing into an Epic Games account to transfer your progress to our new account system has passed. If you require assistance to manually migrate your account, please contact support.*

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Hey brawlers,

Jeremy here, Game Director of Knockout City, here with some more info on our upcoming 7.1 update.

For starters, we caught some localization issues late in the submission process, so the planned release tomorrow (September 20th) is delayed by a bit. We’ll confirm a new date when we have it, but it’s looking like it’ll be another week or two before this launches for everyone. I also wanted to share a little more about why we decided to use Epic Online Services, and a bit more about what it means for you as a player.

So, why are we making this change? Knockout City has always been a game where we want to be sure as many people can play as possible. Cross-play and cross-progression have always been important to us, and above anything else, we always wanted to keep that, whether we’re published by EA Originals or we’re flying solo and self-publishing as Velan Studios. When we launched the game, we had the full support of everything EA had to offer. They handled publishing the game to every platform it’s on, they handled a bunch of backend systems that feed into the game, and most importantly for this post, they also handled our account systems.

For any game that has cross-play and cross-progression, there needs to be a unified account system that connects them all. Without it, there’s no way for the progress you make on your PlayStation 5 to carry over when you play on your Nintendo Switch. This is because your PSN account and your Nintendo account do not have a way to talk to each other. In Year 1 of Knockout City, Origin was that unified account system. Logging in with an EA account is available on every platform Knockout City is on. That EA login isn’t available for games not published by EA, so while they’ve been a great partner to us before, during, and after the publishing transition, we need to find a new way to manage those accounts across all platforms for the future.

Turns out, there aren’t many options for cross-platform login systems! We had a few requirements heading into this process:

• It needed to support every platform Knockout City is on moving forward (PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC through Steam and Epic - We won’t be on Origin after this migration period is over).
• It needed to support reporting / banning functions in addition to login.
• We wanted to avoid being the account holders ourselves, to avoid managing COPPA, GDPR, and other legalities that we’re not ready to take on as an indie studio right now. This means we didn’t want to build our own, or use a white label (an “off-the-shelf” product that we can customize and brand as our own) option.

We were looking for a pretty unique product! Epic Online Services was the only one that checked all of our boxes. It was pretty easy to integrate as well, which means our dev team could more quickly move on to other features for players after wrapping up account migrations! EOS is offered to developers for free, so we didn’t pay for access to this tool, and Epic didn’t pay us to integrate it, either. This isn’t a move toward the game being published by Epic, or Epic acquiring Velan Studios, it’s just a necessary move to a new login system, since we can’t use EA’s after deciding to self-publish Knockout City.

Our previous blog post about this explained a little, but what exactly happens after our 7.1 update rolls out? The first time you log in to Knockout City after the patch, you’ll see this screen, which prompts you to agree to transfer ownership of your game data from EA to Velan (note, Velan will own all of your game data moving forward, not Epic).

After that, you’ll see this screen, which prompts you to either sign in to an existing Epic Account or create a new one.

After you’re signed in to an Epic account, you’ll see this final screen to agree to linking your KO City account with this Epic account. This is a one-time process that happens automatically in the background.

That’s it! Once you’ve linked accounts, every time you launch the game from that platform in the future, you’ll be automatically logged in, just like you are today with your EA account. If you’re playing on a console, there’s no change in how you launch the game or play the game. Same if you play on Steam, you’re still playing on Steam. Steam won’t even need to boot up the Epic launcher in the way that Origin does today.

One final note: we’ve heard a lot of people concerned for players that may not be able to migrate in the timeframe we already shared. We’ve talked internally a bit based on this feedback, and there will be a manual migration process after this window is closed. We want to stress: this is a manual process. We strongly recommend everyone migrate before the 8.1 update, when it can be done automatically. We don’t know entirely what the manual process will look like, but it’s definitely something that can’t be done automatically, and might mean you need to wait an extended period of time while your request is processed. This process also can’t be maintained forever, but it will be available into early 2023.

We’ll share more on timing for 7.1 when we have it. In the meantime, enjoy the KO City x TMNT event that kicks off tomorrow! Mutation Rotation is a super transformative Playlist that I hope everyone has fun playing.

Until next time!