Developer

Tears of Metal is developed and published by Paper Cult, an independent video game studio founded in 2014 and based in Montreal, Canada. The studio is known for creating games with stylized visuals and distinctive gameplay mechanics.

Previous Games

Paper Cult was founded in 2014 by Raphael Toulouse and Michael Emond. Their first game, Fat Mask, a local multiplayer title, released in 2017, followed by the action game Bloodroots, which launched in 2020 and reached Steam the following year. Tears of Metal represents Paper Cult's most ambitious project to date in terms of scale, featuring co-op multiplayer, a full roguelike progression system, and a large number of handcrafted environments.

Development of Tears of Metal

Tears of Metal was first revealed at Summer Game Fest 2024. The studio ran multiple rounds of public testing, including a demo during Steam Next Fest in October 2025 and an open beta in April 2025 during the Triple-i Initiative Showcase. Each test period incorporated player feedback into the development process.

The game was originally planned for a 2025 release but was pushed back to allow for additional polish, with the window narrowing from Q1 2026 to Spring 2026. Paper Cult cited positive reception to the demo and a desire to deliver a more refined experience as reasons for the delays. In June 2026 the studio acknowledged it had missed the Spring window and set a firm Early Access date of July 22, 2026 for PC, which it hit. On launch day Paper Cult said the Xbox Series X|S version remained on track for later in 2026 and would join Xbox Game Pass when it arrived. By the week of launch Paper Cult described Tears of Metal as the product of almost six years of work.

By the week of launch the studio described Tears of Metal as the product of almost six years of work. It became Paper Cult's biggest commercial release: more than 100,000 copies sold, announced on July 27, 2026 and reached at some point in the first five days, against a team the studio consistently describes as small.

Team and Collaborators

Paper Cult began as a small team of friends and grew by adding collaborators for each project rather than by scaling into a large studio. Raphael Toulouse, a co-founder, serves as creative director on Tears of Metal and writes most of the studio's public development updates. Audio is handled by the Montreal studio SIDE Montreal, which composed the game's original soundtrack; see Music and Audio.

The studio's own site lists three collaborators on the project: the audio partner, the public relations agency Pop Agenda, and the Canada Media Fund, the Canadian public funding body.

Public testing was substantial in scale for a studio this size. The second open beta, run over a weekend in August and September 2025, logged 33,526 runs and 8,643 hours of play, and the feedback from it produced 231 tracked development tasks before any bug reports were counted. The free demo that followed was played by more than 250,000 people.

Community and Feedback

Paper Cult operates an official Discord server for community engagement. Players can also submit feedback through the Steam forums and an in-game feedback tool included in the Early Access build. The studio has indicated that player feedback during Early Access will directly shape the game's continued development, including decisions about additional content such as new heroes and game modes.

That channel stayed busy after launch. Paper Cult shipped six builds in the first eleven days, ran a pinned developer thread explaining the cross-play beta branch, pointed bug reports at a dedicated sub-forum with instructions for attaching logs, and published a running list of what it was working on next. The studio said it could not reply to every message but was cataloguing and acting on the feedback, and it attributed the post-launch economy and difficulty reworks directly to it.