Loadout

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

~ the last words ~

Most games die of indifference, which is hard to put a date on. Loadout died of paperwork, which is easy: the servers went off on 24 May 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation became enforceable on 25 May.

Edge of Reality was an Austin studio founded in 1998 by Rob Cohen, who had been lead programmer on Turok at Iguana, together with Mike Panoff out of Paradigm. For most of its life it was a port house. The Nintendo 64 versions of the first three Tony Hawk games came out of that building. Loadout, released on Steam on 31 January 2014, was the original game.

It was free to install and cartoonishly violent, the sort of violence where a leg comes off and nobody in the room takes it seriously. Reviews landed around 72 on Metacritic. Steam settled at Very Positive across roughly thirty-six thousand player reviews, which is a better long-run signal than any launch score.

I was thirty-four in 2018 and working as an engineer, which is the year GDPR stopped being something lawyers discussed and started being documents that landed on technical people's desks. That is the part of this grave I recognize. The game itself I never installed.

~ the record ~

~ the gun ~

The reason anyone remembers Loadout is the weapon builder. You did not pick a rifle off a list. You assembled one out of parts, and the parts combined without much supervision, so people built things that had no business functioning and the game rendered them anyway. Support weapons that healed teammates came out of the same bin as the rockets, so the distance between a medic and an artillery piece was a couple of components.

The rest of it was ordinary. Four maps at launch and the mode list every arena shooter ships with, plus matchmaking that IGN called straight-up broken in its review. The customization carried the game. That is not unusual in free-to-play, where the thing people stay for is rarely the thing that got reviewed.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement came on 7 May 2018 and it was unusually direct about money. The studio said large companies had the resources to comply with GDPR and that it did not. Overhauling Loadout to meet a long list of new requirements was, in its own words, something it could not do. It also went out of its way to say it was not giving up on anyone's privacy, which reads like a studio that expected to be accused of exactly that.

There was a second problem stacked on the first. The cloud provider Loadout ran on was ending the service it used, and porting to the replacement was described as a major undertaking the studio also could not fund. Server costs had been climbing while income stayed flat. The statement's own phrasing was that this put the game deep into the red, losing an alarming amount of money every month.

The servers went off on 24 May. Edge of Reality closed the same year. A separate PlayStation 4 Premium Edition, published across several Asian countries in January 2018, outlived the main game and went dark on 26 September 2020 because nobody could pay for those servers either. A fan project called Loadout Reloaded has since brought the multiplayer back for whoever still wants it.

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