A Trip to Edge of Reality
Loadout is an amazing game that you should still totally go try out if you haven’t played it already. I’ve written about it twice before, and when I recently moved to Austin one of the secondary reasons was a desire to meet the developers. Edge of Reality is a company that has developed both original games and console ports since 1999, and as a huge fan of their self-published shooter I drove to Edge of Reality’s studio this Tuesday in the hopes of meeting them.
I had obtained their address from Google: 6500 River Place Blvd. River Place is a large office complex consisting of multiple buildings with countless businesses on each floor. I actually had a surprising amount of trouble locating Edge of Reality as the touchscreen-directories were down and most people said they’d never heard of that company, but finally a woman in the second building lobby pointed me to Building V, though she warned me that she’d seen Edge of Reality packing their stuff into boxes a few months ago and had heard they shut down.
When I took the elevator up to the third floor of the fifth building, all that greeted me was a partially-renovated floor full of construction equipment and workers. Their supervisor confirmed what the woman had warned me about; Edge of Reality had closed down and this floor had been empty for months.
Just to be sure, I visited River Place’s Management Department, which was in the fourth building, and a manager told me the same story. Edge of Reality went out of business a few months ago, their studio is completely cleaned out and there was no provided way to contact them.
I would reach out to Edge of Reality for contact but they’ve provided me with very little options to do so. Their website has no phone number, no mailing address (not even the studio address I’d just visited), and only two emails, one for outsourcers and one for jobseekers. And even that page warns: “Only candidates being considered for interview will be contacted at this time.” Indeed there has been almost no activity from the company on any of their social media since May, with many facets such as the Facebook page and the official Twitch stream being completely silent since March.
With similar warnings that the official forums are being shut down, this doesn’t bode well for Loadout‘s future. I would love it if Edge of Reality came out to give their fans some sort of update on things, perhaps an official statement on whether they were closed down or not, but their complete and total radio silence would make such an announcement a departure from the norm. For now, I’ll just reiterate what I said at the start of this article: Go try out Loadout if you haven’t already. There might not be much time left for you to do so.
Editor’s edit, 17th August 2015: An update from the CEO, and it referenced this article! Turns out EOR are still in business, just about, and Loadout isn’t going to die until the revenue it makes dries up, they just closed their office.
Editor’s edit, 2nd January 2016: Well their forums are broken. Shame.