It’s hard to believe that Steel Hunters was made by Wargaming of all people, because the service game giant got a lot wrong here.
In fact, Steel Hunters had a lot of arguments on its side. First of all, the mech shooter looks bombastically good. It’s also free, comes from Wargaming and theoretically has a gigantic budget behind it. And the fact that mech games can definitely reach a target group is currently illustrated very impressively by Mecha Break (albeit not without controversy).
However, Steel Hunters was a colossal flop. The PvPvE shooter launched in Early Access in April 2025, reached only around 4,000 simultaneously active players even then, received mixed Steam reviews and is now facing the consequences: Wargaming is pulling the plug on the game before the end of the Early Access phase. In October 2025, it’s finally over.
During this so-called sunsetting phase, you get all the mechs and content of the game for free, so you can still try everything out for around 90 days, but then the shutdown follows. And it is absolutely bizarre that a game from Wargaming, of all companies, should fall flat on its face like this. Reason enough to take a closer look at the areas of friction.
What went wrong with Steel Hunters?
The shutdown of Steel Hunters naturally affects the remaining fans as well as the developers involved. This makes it all the more important that we as a community look at what went wrong here in order to learn from our mistakes. And indeed, Wargaming seems to have hit a stumbling block with Steel Hunters of all things, which the World of Tanks group usually overcomes much more confidently.
Problem number 1: The marketing
Steel Hunters was announced at the Game Awards 2024 and, according to the studio, took three years to develop. Despite various alpha and beta phases, however, no one was allowed to talk about their experiences. And in hindsight, this bites the game in the ass, because according to many YouTubers Steel Hunters ran much, much smoother in the beta phase than it did at the actual Early Access launch date.
Wargaming has taken the opportunity here to build up momentum before the actual launch and fuel people’s anticipation. Of course, on the other hand, there is a lot to be said against overly long pre-release marketing, but Wargaming in particular knows how to market its own products very aggressively. Steel Hunters remained largely under the radar, so hardly anyone noticed the actual launch.
Problem number 2: The release state
Steel Hunter did not go well on release. Here, too, the beta testers state that, ironically, the game ran much smoother behind closed doors before release, but in Early Access the frame rate dropped permanently – regardless of your own computer performance. There were crashes, stutters, server problems and, and, and.
The Steam ratings plummeted as a result, with only 57 percent of reviews being positive. Also not good marketing for a game that was in desperate need of hype.
Problem number 3: The longevity of the gameplay
Steel Hunters was released with few maps, a fairly straightforward progression and even deleted three mechs that were already playable during the beta. As a result, there was very little to play, with the first post-launch announcements mainly revolving around bringing the deleted mechs back into the game.
So there was only one reason to play Steel Hunters: the gameplay itself. And that was the core strength of the game, no question about it, it was just that the performance issues were just killing too many matches.
We can’t go behind the scenes, but all indications are that Wargaming must have diverted resources away from the project at some point in development. There were almost two years between the early beta testing phases and the launch, and according to insiders, almost no new content was added in that entire time span.
Steel Hunters actually had the potential to be a really great mech shooter for a pretty ravenous community (hello, Titanfall fans), but the game apparently never got the attention or at least the polish it needed to survive the Early Access launch in good health. A real shame about that.
