Funktronic Labs Ditches Battle Royale, Launches Scramble Knights Online on Game Pass
Funktronic Labs scrapped years of battle royale development, relaunching Scramble Knights Online as a co-op MMO-lite that debuted today as a day-one Xbox Game Pass title.
Funktronic Labs spent nearly three years building a battle royale, then threw out the one feature that defined it. Scramble Knights Online launched in Early Access today on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC and as a day-one Xbox Game Pass title, arriving not as the 32-player PvP shooter the studio originally announced but as a cooperative MMO-lite built around questing with friends instead of fighting them.
From Royale to Online
The project started life as Scramble Knights Royale, a top-down battle royale that mixed questing and dungeon loot with last-knight-standing PvP across 32-player lobbies. According to Funktronic Labs' own account on Xbox Wire, early playtests showed the opposite of what the studio expected: players loved the world of Terracott, its exploration and its sense of adventure, but the battle royale structure kept emptying lobbies. One recurring piece of feedback summed it up bluntly: testers said they would play the game if it weren't for the PvP.
Rather than patch around the problem, the team spent months prototyping alternatives, including a Capture the Flag mode and a straight Team Deathmatch mode, before concluding that the fighting itself wasn't the draw. Founder Eddie Lee pointed the team back to the game's original pitch, a simple idea the studio had circled back to throughout development: adventuring with friends, not against them.
Building the MMO-lite
That shift produced what Funktronic Labs calls an "MMO-lite": a shared online kingdom where up to four players party up for Zelda-inspired dungeons, monster hunts and loot runs instead of elimination matches. The studio kept its existing world and combat systems but rebuilt the structure around them, adding a Town Square hub for players to gather between runs, cooperative dungeons in place of PvP zones, and persistent MMO-style progression, NPCs, quests and crafting. PvP didn't disappear entirely; invasions remain as an optional threat layered on top of the cooperative loop, alongside a "Chicken Mode" that turns fallen players into spectating chickens rather than ending their session outright.
Converting the existing battle royale build into the new structure took less than six months on top of the roughly four years Funktronic Labs has now put into the project overall, spanning the original Royale concept, a 2025 announcement, an open beta test and today's relaunch as Scramble Knights Online.
What's in Early Access today
The Early Access release opens with the game's first area, which Funktronic Labs says holds roughly five hours of unique content on its own, with three further tiers of regions and quests planned to build toward a full release the studio estimates at around 40 hours of unique content. A duo-queue option for players who want to adventure as a pair rather than a full party of four is slated to follow later this year. The studio has said it expects Scramble Knights Online to stay in Early Access for at least a year while it builds out the remaining content.
The game is listed on Steam as a paid Early Access title, and supports Xbox Play Anywhere, meaning a single purchase covers console, PC and compatible handhelds. Players who already own it through Xbox Game Pass get access without an additional purchase for as long as the game remains in the subscription.
Why the pivot matters
The genre swap is a notable reversal for a small studio this deep into a project, and it lands at a moment when several battle royale and live-service bets elsewhere in the industry have struggled to hold onto players after launch. Funktronic Labs effectively treated its own playtest data as a stop-loss signal rather than pushing a PvP mode players weren't responding to, and it had the flexibility as an independent studio to retool the game's genre without a publisher mandate forcing it to ship the original pitch. The result keeps the parts of Scramble Knights that tested well, the world of Terracott and its exploration-driven combat, while dropping the structure that was driving players away.
More on the game, including its current roadmap and Early Access patch notes, is available through Scramble Knights Online's official site and the Funktronic Labs studio page.
Official links
Theo covers the business of games for Gamers6: studio moves, platform strategy and the press releases nobody else finishes reading. He files most days before the coffee is cold.
