Three friends, one dead mod scene, eight years later.

How this started

Delia, Ray and our first engineer met in the mod community around an arena shooter that its publisher quietly switched off in 2016. When the servers went dark, a few hundred people carried on playing on community boxes, and the three of them kept shipping map packs to an audience that technically no longer existed.

That turned into a prototype, the prototype turned into a small state arts-and-technology grant plus a pile of personal savings, and in 2018 the grant became a company with a very cheap office above a taco place on the east side. Emberfall shipped in 2019 to modest sales and a fiercely loyal player base. It paid for the next four years, which is all we asked of it.

Riftbound Arena launched free-to-play in 2023 and is now the studio's main focus: a live game with seasonal ranked play, a ten-week content cadence and a support team that reads its own inbox. We have never taken outside investment beyond that first grant, we have never run a crunch mandate, and we still argue about movement acceleration in a channel that has been going since 2017.

What we care about

• Ranked has to be honest. A competitive game that people don't trust is a party game with extra steps.
• Ship small, ship often. Ten-week seasons, weekly balance passes, and patch notes written by the person who made the change.
• Say the awkward part. If we broke something, it goes in the notes. If a fix will take a month, we say a month.