Tanki X

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

~ the eulogy ~

AlternativaPlatform had exactly one hit and spent the second half of the 2010s trying to replace it. The studio was founded in Perm in 2006 on Flash technology, and the thing it built with that technology was Tanki Online, a browser tank shooter released on 4 June 2009 that turned into the kind of product a Russian studio can live on for a decade. Tanki X was the answer to the question everyone in that position had to answer around 2015: what do you ship when the plugin goes away.

The answer was the same game in Unity. Same arcade physics, same modular tanks where you bolt a turret onto a hull and paint it, but now a downloadable client for Windows and macOS instead of a tab. Open beta started on 15 September 2016 and the full release arrived on Steam on 20 April 2017. It was free to play and funded by X Crystals, which bought cosmetic skins and blueprint containers rather than firepower.

I was thirty two the year that beta opened and had long since stopped clicking on tank arenas. The browser-game era I actually remember is the plugin era, when the whole point was that nothing needed an installer and you could be in a match before the page finished loading. Tanki X asked you to download a client, which turned out to be the exact step its own audience did not want to take.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sequel problem ~

Nobody migrated. The studio ended up operating two games for one audience, and the older one kept winning: Tanki Online turned ten in 2019, shipped a mobile version, and got a new interface that July. Tanki X had better graphics and a Steam page and a population that would not grow past the people who had already tried it.

The goodbye post is unusually direct about why. The PC market was too competitive and overloaded, it says, and the game could not be made popular abroad as well as at home. Leadership concluded that it was not profitable and put the resources back into the browser game it had been built to succeed.

~ the closure plan ~

On 3 September 2019 tankix.com posted a notice titled "Tanki X is discontinued in the end of 2019". The English version went up on the Steam community feed on the 23rd, over the signature of "all former team of the game", which is a tense that tells you the staff had already been reassigned.

What followed was a four-point schedule, and it is a tidier wind-down than most games get. Payments, registration, social media and the support site were switched off through September. Technical and experimental updates continued until the end of December, with servers restarting whenever the team needed them to. At the start of 2020 the servers went off and every player record was deleted. The fourth point was an email address that would keep answering questions about accounts in a game that no longer existed. The same post handed out a promo code so people could spend currency they had no remaining reason to buy.

~ what is still standing ~

The closure date is worth pinning down because the obvious source has it wrong. en.wikipedia records 31 December 2019, which is the announcement's own phrasing rather than an observation of anything. The Tanki community wikis both give 22 January 2020 for the day the servers actually stopped answering, and that is the date used here.

tankix.com is still live in 2026 and still serving its 2016 marketing page, tagline and screenshots intact, with the news route resolving to the same front page. A fan project called Revive Tanki put the game back up in 2021 and is still running it. The studio is at 47 people and the browser game is in its seventeenth year.

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