Heavy Metal Machines

» see heavymetalmachines.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A free multiplayer game launching in 2017 had a specific problem in Turkey, where I live: League of Legends. Riot had put a Turkish server in the country years earlier and the internet cafes ran it on every machine in the room, with the Turkish league on television to keep it there. Asking four friends to install something else and learn new rules was asking a lot. Heavy Metal Machines was asking it from Brazil, against that.

Hoplon Infotainment had been in Florianópolis since 2000 and was one of the few Brazilian studios with a real track record, built on Taikodom, a space MMO that ran for years before closing in May 2015. Heavy Metal Machines went into production in 2013 and reached Steam Early Access on 31 January 2017. The design owed nothing to anyone. Four armored cars a side in a post-apocalyptic arena, and the win condition was freight. A bomb spawned in the middle of the map, somebody had to physically carry it into the enemy base, and everybody else existed to protect that car or to wreck it.

It left Early Access on 19 September 2018 as a full free-to-play release and reached PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in February 2021. Across the whole run it accumulated 800,000 downloads and kept warm Steam reviews. The concurrent player graph tells the other story. Its highest simultaneous count on Steam, ever, was 442, and that happened in 2017. By May 2022 the game was drawing under 50 players a day on the platform where most of its audience lived.

On 3 May 2022 Hoplon posted the notice. Every platform and every mode would stop on 30 August 2022, the in-game store along with them. "Discontinuing HMM was a difficult decision," the post said, and the studio held a farewell developer stream two days later with the Discord staying open for a while after. On 30 August the dedicated servers went off and the game became unplayable, which for a title with no offline mode means it stopped existing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how a match worked ~

The bomb mechanic deserves a note because it solved a problem most arena games solve badly. In a game with lanes and towers, a new player cannot tell what is happening. In Heavy Metal Machines the entire match state was one object you could see on the screen, being driven somewhere by somebody, and your job was obvious within five seconds of your first game. Cars were role-locked, so the machine you picked decided whether your job was to haul the bomb or to stop the car hauling it.

~ the metal league ~

Hoplon ran a real esports circuit for it. The Metal League was weekly, mostly on Saturdays, with a prize pool of 5,000 euro and brackets that started in Europe before expanding into the United States and Brazil. For a game whose peak concurrency was in the hundreds, a weekly European tournament with cash on the line was a lot of structure to build on top of a few hundred people. The league ran anyway, season after season, until the game it was built for stopped.

~ the last stream ~

Hoplon survived the shutdown as a company and the game did not get a successor. The studio had now closed two live products, Taikodom in 2015 and Heavy Metal Machines in 2022, both of which were technically ambitious Brazilian titles that could not hold an audience against the global free-to-play giants. Brazil's game industry got substantially bigger during exactly those years, and the growth went to mobile studios and to work-for-hire pipelines serving foreign publishers. Running your own arena servers out of Santa Catarina was the harder business.

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