Fortnite is several weeks into the first season of its fourth chapter. In real time, it's been going strong since the summer of 2017, and though Epic doesn't share player counts, by any available metric it seems to still be doing incredibly well. But in the live-service world, Fortnite's success feels increasingly rare. While there do exist other major successes in the pocket of the games industry where studios operate one game for years on end, many others are closing their proverbial doors for good, which is extremely scary both for players worried about gaming history and future developers concerned with the trends they may be tasked with chasing. Can live-service games survive modest successes, or must they all be as massive as Fortnite to make it?

This is not an investigative feature that can bring closure to some of these questions, I admit. Rather, I'm merely mourning the loss of yet more games that will soon be lost to time, including another of my all-time favorites. When Velan Studios took to social media to alert players that its PvP dodgeball game, Knockout City (KOC), would be closing forever in June, it genuinely ruined my night.

Roughly one year after breaking away from EA to self-publish the game and reimagine its economy for a free-to-play world, it seems KOC's successes were not numerous enough to keep the game going. Kinda Funny's Blessing Adeoye Jr. put it best: