Loadout shutting down this month ahead of GDPR

The European Union's impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can carve another notch into the barrel of its pen, as the makers of Loadout have cited the GDPR as one of the reasons they plan to shut down the free-to-play arena shooter. Several problems squeezing at once meant it'd be too expensive to rework a game that was already losing money and so, similar to Super Monday Night Combat, it'll shut down this month. Loadout had entered early access in May 2013, then launched in January 2014. And was pretty good, Old Man Rossignol said in his Loadout review.

The GDPR comes into effect on May 25th, at which point companies doing business with EU folk will need to follow new rules about keeping customer data. Coming into compliance isn't a mega-huge cost but for a game that's already hobbling along--Loadout has 200-ish players online at peak time--it can be large enough.

Loadout was already "losing an alarming amount of money per month" before the GDPR came along, developers Edge Of Reality said in yesterday's announcement.

Their overall server costs had recently become "much higher", the studio explained, while revenues had stayed flat. They said they were also facing reworking Loadout to work on a new product from their cloud server provider as the current is being discontinued, which would be "a major undertaking" and they simply "don't have the resources to do that."

So the game was already in trouble, but the GDPR is setting a deadline and giving it one final shove.

"The well-intended GDPR legislation creates major burdens for small companies to do business in the EU, starting on 5/25. We don't have the resources to update Loadout to GDPR compliance, and a big portion of Loadout players come from the EU. Sadly, while big companies have the resources to comply with the GDPR, that's not always the case for small businesses. We still protect your privacy, and we wouldn't dream of doing otherwise. We just don't have the resources to overhaul Loadout and implement new features to meet a large list of new requirements."

And that's that.

"Any one of these could have been fatal, but with all of them hitting at once, it's clear that we have no choice but to shut it down."

So Loadout will shut down on May 24th then become unplayable. The devs say "Maybe someday Loadout will return" but that's a big maybe, so if you're curious go grab it free on Steam now.

"I like it," Jim said in 2014. "Very much. It plays well, and I will even forgive it for being third-person." Have a look while you can?