Eddie Lee Drops Scramble Knights Royale After 3 Years — Battle Royale Game
Funktronic Labs has dropped its battle royale game Scramble Knights Royale after 3 years and renamed it Scramble Knights Online. Eddie Lee said the studio had been “cooking this Zelda-inspired battle royale game,” but the numbers never justified the original plan.
The team said in a Steam update that “a live-service Battle Royale was not going to work for us.” That is the blunt kind of pivot smaller studios usually make after the market has already forced the issue, not after they have spent years trying to hold the line.
Eddie Lee and the pivot
Lee, the studio co-founder, put the reversal even more plainly in an accompanying YouTube video on the official Funktronic channel: “the haters were right.” He tied that line to the studio’s three-year push to keep the original idea alive, even as people questioned an indie studio releasing a battle royale in 2026.
Scramble Knights Royale is now Scramble Knights Online, and that name change is the clearest sign that the project is no longer being sold as a straight battle royale. Funktronic Labs is not pretending this was a cosmetic tweak; it walked away from the live-service framing entirely.
Three years on one bet
Three years is a long time to commit to any game concept, and even longer for a battle royale plan that had to convince a skeptical market. Funktronic Labs said it stayed true to the original vision for that span, which makes the reversal more than a simple title change. It is a reset of the business model as much as the design.
Lee’s phrase “cooking this Zelda-inspired battle royale game” explains the studio’s ambition and its problem at once. The pitch had personality, but the studio eventually reached the point where the numbers just were not numbering, and that is usually where smaller teams discover that a crowded genre can swallow a project before launch.
What Scramble Knights means now
The new name, Scramble Knights Online, suggests a project that can be framed differently from the battle royale it used to be. For players, the practical takeaway is simple: this is no longer a studio trying to force a live-service Battle Royale into the same lane it occupied for three years. It is a pivot away from the version that drew the skepticism in the first place.
For Funktronic Labs, the real test now is whether the revised game can stand on a cleaner, more sustainable promise than the one it just abandoned. The studio already answered the hardest question by changing course; the next one is whether the new version gives it a better shot at release than the old battle royale ever did.
