Super Mecha Champions

» see smc.vip as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Battle royales were a crowded field by 2019 and NetEase shipped one with a premise nobody else was using: you fight in a giant robot. The pilot can get out and fight on foot, and sometimes should, but the world is not built around the pilot. Streets and sightlines were laid out at mech scale, which quietly changes how a hundred-player map reads. Cover for a person is not cover for a machine that size. The Japanese title, 機動都市X, puts the city in the name rather than the robot.

The roster is where the money went. Thirty-seven mechs by mid-2024, and each one came attached to a specific pilot with a backstory and a Japanese voice actor. Firefox was a scrapped machine that a girl named Nin rebuilt with her father after watching a star pilot compete, modeled on a clay fox she made as a child. Arthur belonged to a war ace who walked away from his unit and spent eight years as a wanted man before the record was cleared. Five mechs were free and the rest cost crystals or grind. The cyberpunk modeler Koji Kamata supervised one of the maps.

The phone version arrived in 2019 and the worldwide launch landed on 25 July that year, iOS first. Steam followed in March 2021. By late 2024 the Steam forum was full of players counting bots in their lobbies and arguing about whether old seasonal content being recycled meant what they thought it meant. It meant what they thought it meant.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ mechs at building scale ~

Alongside the hundred-player mode there was a ten-player team fight to fifty kills and a two-against-two duel format where each side picked three machines. The variants were the tell. Small-lobby modes get added to a battle royale when the hundred-player queue has stopped filling reliably, and this one had two of them well before the end.

~ nothing was kept ~

The Steam notice went up on 20 November 2024 and did its work in two steps. That same afternoon at 14:00 UTC+8 the store page stopped offering downloads, new registrations closed, and top-ups were cut off. Two months later, on 20 January 2025 at 14:00 UTC+8, the servers went down for good.

The sentence worth quoting is the one about what happens next: once the servers are offline, all account data will be permanently deleted. The notice spells out what account data covers, down to the materials in your inventory. Not frozen, and not left inert on a machine in a rack somewhere. Deleted. The same notice then tells players they can keep spending crystals until the shutdown on 20 January at 00:00, fourteen hours before the hour it gives everywhere else, which is the kind of contradiction that survives a legal review because nobody is going to litigate a free game's last afternoon.

~ the server they kept ~

Mainland China ran a separate build called 机动都市阿尔法 with the same game inside it, and it was wound down on its own schedule a week ahead. Downloads and registrations closed on 13 November 2024, and on 13 January 2025 every designated server was shut except one. The survivor is named 细水长流, an idiom about a thin stream that runs a long time, used for anything done modestly enough to last.

Unused paid crystals were converted into NetEase points and dropped into the player's account for use in the company's other games, with extra pickups offered in three of them. New content development stopped. So the Chinese version went into hospice rather than the ground, under a name that reads, in hindsight, like somebody in that building had a sense of humor about it. The global build got no such arrangement. Its players got a deletion notice and a two-month warning, and the app is no longer listed in the App Store today.

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