On August 11 2025 17:26 SHODAN wrote: it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox.
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning.
It's not about your shopping bag, but the items in your cart. These insane bitches with their fancy bags. Sometimes I roll in with nothing, not even a basket. I go in for bananas and suddenly I have 25 items. It's a skill unto itself to tetris that shit in there so it doesn't fall through. Even start putting stuff in between my legs. Some lady passes with a giant cart with just margarine in it. This btich has way too much square footage.
I think both of you dudes are correct. I do think you need a proper budget for some things. SIGNALIS is cool but it aint no Warcraft 4. It leans into its indiness with abstraction, mysteriousness, and tropiness. There aren't many characters or models to worry about, the environments are pretty homogeneous. And it took these hamburgers a pizza slice of their grownup life to make it. It is a beautiful thing unto itself—dare I say, the meaning of life (for some)—to make shit like this. But Wombat is right. There is a spectrum. But it's also a lesson to not get too ambitious, and to stay within your wheelhouse, and maybe make the best possible thing you can make with the tools you have, as SHODAN McSignalis has said.
Yes James Cameron made Terminator on pennies, but then he got real money and made Terminator 2, a far superior film where you see that money on screen. If you want to tell me T1 is better than T2, then I'll see you outside. In Hell, even.
On August 11 2025 17:26 SHODAN wrote: it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox.
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning.
Yes James Cameron made Terminator on pennies, but then he got real money and made Terminator 2, a far superior film where you see that money on screen. If you want to tell me T1 is better than T2, then I'll see you outside. In Hell, even.
Terminator is better than T2. Arnold played a more compelling hunter-killer than Robert Patrick. T1 also has Kyle Reece, a way darker tone, a better soundtrack, and a truly stand-out scene at the Tech Noir club. that whole sequence builds tension and dread better than any scene in T2, and all it took was a bit of slow-motion and reverb.
Despite lacking cohesion, the Infernal faction design was more interesting and had more charm than it does now (how is this even possible)
A number of features were still not implemented so they could have been good, we didn't know yet
3rd faction wasn't implemented yet, people had high hopes
Campaign wasn't implemented, people had high hopes
I admire some of your optimism, Roger. But these ones above are the ones that stand out for me. Stormgate was always and only ever built on a combination of hype and hope. FG cashed in their reputations for cash. Maybe intentionally, but just hubris, but it happened. TimC and TimM were both 5 years from retirement [no proof, just speculating based on 55 year old cali software guys] -- It's not a coincidence.
Here's a copy-paste of something I posted on the Stormgate subreddit.
All of these ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot companies feel like they're god's gift to game development and they have ALL failed for that reason. They don't know how to adjust and continue to work as they used to when they worked for a company that printed money. Let's fly consultants out to test our game. Let's buy audio equipment suitable for Hans Zimmer to record our OST. Let's have 2 concept art artists on staff who don't add direct value to the product. Let's ensure we have a 5 person Legal & HR department for our small team. Let's hire a personal chef to make free lunches in our posh office space. Let's have team outings to the Dodger's game to "recharge". Meanwhile, the actual game is mediocre and not improving. These guys are powderpuffs.
Others are doing a lot more, with less. It was a passion project, with nothing but a passion for living large on other peoples' money. The 5 year gravy train is come to an end.
https://bonfirestudios.com/ is another example of people burning $40M and coming up with nothing. Jury is still out on that one, but their playtest is in a couple of weeks but it also looks very sus for a 5 year dev cycle with 30-40 people.
you are a poet. that is a quality roast and puts into words the vitriol that I share towards the leadership at FG
the next great RTS will not be made by tired ex-Blizzard devs and I doubt it will come from an orange county / silicon valley studio either. that part of the world seems to attract the most out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt individuals in the industry. they have nothing of value to offer anyone who lives outside their bubble
Ya i agree. There's a huge bubble over there. I've worked on game dev a bit myself, i have some friends who do it full time. They've been sharing apartments, working from their bedrooms and living on ramen sometimes to make the numbers add up. It's a completely different world to giving yourself half a million a year plus stock and all of the other stuff from the whiteboard phase of development. The contrast feels quite insulting. It shouldn't be that difficult to get by, but FG's spend was 10-100x greater per employee and that's something that i find difficult to imagine, let alone justify.
Zerospace seems closer to the indie stuff than to FG, and they seem to be doing much better for it - although there are some issues like UE4 RTS not performing well and they don't really have the resources to fix those foundational issues.
my favourite game of the decade (so far) is SIGNALIS, by rose-engine. that's a team of 2 illustrators / game designers based in Hamburg, Germany. they spent 8 years making what would become one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. SIGNALIS is incredibly rich in lore, style and substance. 2 devs, in a bedroom somewhere, with a budget consisting of ramen and passion. nobody knows who the devs are. their real names, what they look or sound like is a mystery. in the years since the game was released, they've only communicated via memes and only ever did 1 or written interviews and that's it. true artists. I bought the game 3 times and gifted 2 copies to friends. that kinda passion just impresses the hell out of me
when I look at efforts like that and compare it to the $40 million dollar slop of Stormgate, it makes me feel a little sick. they're a bunch of posers. there is no artistic value to Stormgate. the lore and the world-building just isn't there, because nobody at FG cares about it. the work done by the external music composers is alright, but yeah - the souls of every dev working in orange county studio have been bought, sold and paid for.
Tim Morten and friends are touting their game in such an annoyingly entitled way - like they automatically deserve recognition and respect from the RTS community. they want all the sc2 / wc3 influencers to rally behind them, despite having very little of value to offer. I'm lurking in the Stormgate discord and they've managed to cultivate this small, cultish fanbase. it's non-stop posts like, "when's Grubby going to stream some of our game?? why hasn't Artosis played the new patch yet? what's wrong with them?! are they Stormgate haters??" then you have people posting screenshots of negative reviews on steam so that they can publicly ridicule them - accusing negative reviewers of being bots and shills. Tim Morten (on his pseudo reddit account) accused "rival RTS companies" of posting fake reviews in order to damage Stormgate's success. some of the cult members picked up on this and started blaming the staff of Battle Aces. if the FG staff had any integrity, they would have scrubbed those posts from their discord or at least spoke up, in order to dispel the rumor. I dunno, maybe I've been reading into it too much, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. besides the game being utter garbage, their paranoid fanbase is enough to turn me off
Dude! Signalis is so cool. They got $ from me when the game launched. I didn't pay any attention to it after playing it nonstop for the week it came out, but wow, nice to see they got their flowers when I checked their Steam reviews just now. Legit this is proper stuff. For me, stuff in the same vein would be Dredge or Citizen Sleeper.
Now, these are all Indie sized games when Stormgate is AA. Nevertheless, there are lots of AA studios doing well, but you truly need to earn it and work your way towards it. See SuperGiant Games. Make a 10 person game and succeed. Then make a 20 person game and succeed. THEN make a 50 person game and succeed. Bastion->Transistor->Pyre->Hades->Hades II. To start from the point they did, based on reputation only. Yeah.. grift/hubris. Odds of success were low. You can't just transplant people and assume you're carrying on right from where you left off.
I dunno. The whole situation continues to rub me the wrong way bigtime.
They can still recover, but it'd require them to admit massive mistakes, drop down to ~5 people remotely and then grind hard for a year. If they were capable of that, they would have done it already. Let's see....
Was looking around at Bonfire again yesterday and they are paying out massive $ for social media directors and community managers for a game that doesn't even exist yet. Whhhhy?
Budget does count to some degree. It’s like if you listen to a 7/10 album, and find out that the dude or dudette played every instrument. Like fuck, that’s impressive shit. But you’ll still enjoy that 8/10 that a regular band with their own specialised instruments played more
what would you enjoy more? a 10/10 album made with unwanted equipment salvaged from a garbage can? or an 8/10 album made with a blank cheque and state-of-the-art bespoke instruments? it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox. what makes art authentic is using the tools that are available to you in the present moment. Kraftwerk could have released a killer album in 1983 using analogue instruments. instead, Florian and Ralf discovered the Synclavier and chose to spend 3 long years agonizing over it (the instruction manual for the Synclavier was as thick as a phone book). meanwhile, the whole music scene rapidly changed around them. by the time they had read and understood the phone book, their upcoming album (tentatively titled Technopop) was becoming mausoleumed by the low-fi proto-techno sounds coming out of Detroit. Floran and Ralf were so obsessed with fidelity and wanting to sound more futuristic than everything else. the cost of their perfectionism was 5 long years between Computer World and what would eventually become Electric Cafe. back then, 5 years was considered an unhealthy creative hiatus. in the computer age we're living in today, the burden of choice is the very first obstacle that any producer has to overcome - and it's why nothing truly creative ever gets done without self-imposed restrictions. music has struggled to sound different since the early 2000's. we've been in a cultural recycling loop, a noise war, and a creative holocaust ever since the computer made its way into peoples living rooms. this anti-creative process resulted in 2 members of Kraftwerk leaving the group out of frustration. Kraftwerk never made another studio album until 2003 (their very last).
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning. you could postpone and linger until you've acquired the perfect, fancy crystal vial to store your lightning in. now you have very little left of your life waiting for lightning to strike again. I believe that what often separates a 10/10 album and an 8/10 album is the urgency to get it made, no matter what sacrifices you have to make in terms of fidelity. it doesn't matter what kind of media it is: music, film, writing or video game. often, the very best examples are produced under significant or even extreme budget restraints. I count money and time to be equally precious in the budget, because time is money. I find it very difficult to compartmentalize AAA, AA and indie games into their own separate categories when it comes to my own personal enjoyment of the experience. imagine if Blizzard had waited until they had the technology and budget of Stormgate before they released Brood War. imagine if Varg Vikernes had gotten a job at McDonalds so that he could afford a real microphone, instead of just recording Filosofem using the busted set of headphones that he had access to at the time. imagine if James Cameron held off on Terminator, or if Tarantino held off on Reservoir Dogs. the whole course of cultural history would have looked different.
I mean sure, I don’t especially care how the sausage is made but you’re just ignoring my entire premise by saying ‘ok but what if some bloke living on beans for 9 years made a 10/10 game, what then?’
I mean yes, that would be rather swell, but if that game existed (to my specific tastes) I’d just be playing it rather than posting bemoaning there not being that ‘killer app’, or seemingly one on the near horizon.
Say I want the ‘StarCraft killerTM’, 9/10, 10/10 game. Stormgate ain’t it, but, as impressive as a Godsworn is for being such a small team, it also ain’t it. And while I find the latter way more impressive in the abstract, that doesn’t manifest in bumping it up a few points when I’m playing it, even though I think it’s an impressive achievement (and a pretty decent too).
I’ve seen other indie games in other genres knock it out of the park, so it certainly can be done. My instinct is, it’s very difficult to do in the RTS genre, simply because folks aren’t doing it. At least in making a killer RTS with the ‘whole package’ as it were. From my understanding it’s simply a harder type of game to develop from a technical side of things to begin with, popular engines people use to great effect for all types of games aren’t quite as ready out the box for RTS. Balancing is way more complicated than it is for many other genres.
It also depends what one wants to do. Or what expectations are. Some compelling twist on the genre, some innovative, killer mode that gets existing genre fans excited, or creates new ones, absolutely it just takes some inspiration, and a small team can conceivably deliver that, and do in many a genre.
If someone wants to make, or potential fans want a Blizz-tier game (not necessarily stylistically), that starts being prohibitively difficult for very small teams, no matter their levels of passion, or how great their ideas. Varied campaigns with great presentation. Engaging core gameplay, vibrant multiplayer, good world building, good voice acting, good music, good artwork and worldbuilding. Different game modes, a fleshed-out feature suite, custom tools. Good technical performance in terms of graphical fidelity versus smoothness and system requirements, solid netcode etc.
Now, the next big step in RTS may not have to be that, ‘whole package’ kinda game. But if you do want that, you’re going to need a budget, unless your small team contains a concentration of genuine polymaths.
As for tools, I’d disagree there. The whole reason there’s such a huge variety and richness of indie games is improved tools. You can have some great ideas, vision and pour your soul into building it without also having to be an engine designer, or how to optimise things at a granular hardware level or whatever.
However, many huge games have at least some kind of budget, some kind of vision and some kind of sensible project management. The latter being a rather underrated facet. Nintendo can reliably put out a handful of absolute bangers every console generation because they’ve got it down to a tee.
Are there many good modern CRPGs on low budgets? Absolutely there’s some quality entries there. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the runaway crossover hit, because Larian had all three of the aforementioned.
Hideo Kojima is about as an idiosyncratic auteur as exists in game development outside of indies, you don’t get as innovative and distinctive a series as MGS without him, but you also don’t get an MGS without Konami giving him money.
On August 11 2025 17:26 SHODAN wrote: it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox.
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning.
It's not about your shopping bag, but the items in your cart. These insane bitches with their fancy bags. Sometimes I roll in with nothing, not even a basket. I go in for bananas and suddenly I have 25 items. It's a skill unto itself to tetris that shit in there so it doesn't fall through. Even start putting stuff in between my legs. Some lady passes with a giant cart with just margarine in it. This btich has way too much square footage.
I think both of you dudes are correct. I do think you need a proper budget for some things. SIGNALIS is cool but it aint no Warcraft 4. It leans into its indiness with abstraction, mysteriousness, and tropiness. There aren't many characters or models to worry about, the environments are pretty homogeneous. And it took these hamburgers a pizza slice of their grownup life to make it. It is a beautiful thing unto itself—dare I say, the meaning of life (for some)—to make shit like this. But Wombat is right. There is a spectrum. But it's also a lesson to not get too ambitious, and to stay within your wheelhouse, and maybe make the best possible thing you can make with the tools you have, as SHODAN McSignalis has said.
Yes James Cameron made Terminator on pennies, but then he got real money and made Terminator 2, a far superior film where you see that money on screen. If you want to tell me T1 is better than T2, then I'll see you outside. In Hell, even.
Yeah this was somewhat the general crux of my point. Also rofl
I’m generally against the death penalty but….
But yeah. I think Memento may be my favourite Chris Nolan film, low budget, very inventive premise. But he couldn’t make Inception without that budgetary goodness.
The Beatles don’t experiment fucking around with magnetic tape etc for Sergeant Pepper if they didn’t have a load of studio time and engineers available to them, which they had because, lads it’s the fucking Beatles let’s leave em to it.
All of classical music’s greats I mean, compositions for solo instruments aside, they need other musicians who can play what they conjure.
Michelangelo isn’t painting the Sistine Chapel without patronage, one could go on.
I think some have this idea that great art can only emerge from personal suffering, or constraints or whatever, and some absolutely does. Plenty does not. It’s all a trade-off between ideas, technical proficiency, having gear good enough to realise your vision, and collaboration with others, in whatever form that takes.
In the (highly unlikely) event I write the greatest guitar riff ever, that’s disappearing into the ether, like tears in rain if I can’t play it, or find someone who can.
Big issue with Indie RTS is that you really just can't release these games on any platform other than Keyboard & Mouse, and not to say its a dying medium, but why elect to handicap yourself that hard. Making an indie game and restricting yourself to no console access is just a bad financial decision.
1.5 person dev team .. has release a game every 2 years for the past 6 years that were all great.
Previously just also finished Haste [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1796470/Haste/] and Wandering Village [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121640/The_Wandering_Village/], which are both like 8-15 person teams. Nothing really to say, just a factoid.
Despite lacking cohesion, the Infernal faction design was more interesting and had more charm than it does now (how is this even possible)
A number of features were still not implemented so they could have been good, we didn't know yet
3rd faction wasn't implemented yet, people had high hopes
Campaign wasn't implemented, people had high hopes
I admire some of your optimism, Roger. But these ones above are the ones that stand out for me. Stormgate was always and only ever built on a combination of hype and hope. FG cashed in their reputations for cash. Maybe intentionally, but just hubris, but it happened. TimC and TimM were both 5 years from retirement [no proof, just speculating based on 55 year old cali software guys] -- It's not a coincidence.
Here's a copy-paste of something I posted on the Stormgate subreddit.
All of these ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot companies feel like they're god's gift to game development and they have ALL failed for that reason. They don't know how to adjust and continue to work as they used to when they worked for a company that printed money. Let's fly consultants out to test our game. Let's buy audio equipment suitable for Hans Zimmer to record our OST. Let's have 2 concept art artists on staff who don't add direct value to the product. Let's ensure we have a 5 person Legal & HR department for our small team. Let's hire a personal chef to make free lunches in our posh office space. Let's have team outings to the Dodger's game to "recharge". Meanwhile, the actual game is mediocre and not improving. These guys are powderpuffs.
Others are doing a lot more, with less. It was a passion project, with nothing but a passion for living large on other peoples' money. The 5 year gravy train is come to an end.
https://bonfirestudios.com/ is another example of people burning $40M and coming up with nothing. Jury is still out on that one, but their playtest is in a couple of weeks but it also looks very sus for a 5 year dev cycle with 30-40 people.
you are a poet. that is a quality roast and puts into words the vitriol that I share towards the leadership at FG
the next great RTS will not be made by tired ex-Blizzard devs and I doubt it will come from an orange county / silicon valley studio either. that part of the world seems to attract the most out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt individuals in the industry. they have nothing of value to offer anyone who lives outside their bubble
Ya i agree. There's a huge bubble over there. I've worked on game dev a bit myself, i have some friends who do it full time. They've been sharing apartments, working from their bedrooms and living on ramen sometimes to make the numbers add up. It's a completely different world to giving yourself half a million a year plus stock and all of the other stuff from the whiteboard phase of development. The contrast feels quite insulting. It shouldn't be that difficult to get by, but FG's spend was 10-100x greater per employee and that's something that i find difficult to imagine, let alone justify.
Zerospace seems closer to the indie stuff than to FG, and they seem to be doing much better for it - although there are some issues like UE4 RTS not performing well and they don't really have the resources to fix those foundational issues.
my favourite game of the decade (so far) is SIGNALIS, by rose-engine. that's a team of 2 illustrators / game designers based in Hamburg, Germany. they spent 8 years making what would become one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. SIGNALIS is incredibly rich in lore, style and substance. 2 devs, in a bedroom somewhere, with a budget consisting of ramen and passion. nobody knows who the devs are. their real names, what they look or sound like is a mystery. in the years since the game was released, they've only communicated via memes and only ever did 1 or written interviews and that's it. true artists. I bought the game 3 times and gifted 2 copies to friends. that kinda passion just impresses the hell out of me
when I look at efforts like that and compare it to the $40 million dollar slop of Stormgate, it makes me feel a little sick. they're a bunch of posers. there is no artistic value to Stormgate. the lore and the world-building just isn't there, because nobody at FG cares about it. the work done by the external music composers is alright, but yeah - the souls of every dev working in orange county studio have been bought, sold and paid for.
Tim Morten and friends are touting their game in such an annoyingly entitled way - like they automatically deserve recognition and respect from the RTS community. they want all the sc2 / wc3 influencers to rally behind them, despite having very little of value to offer. I'm lurking in the Stormgate discord and they've managed to cultivate this small, cultish fanbase. it's non-stop posts like, "when's Grubby going to stream some of our game?? why hasn't Artosis played the new patch yet? what's wrong with them?! are they Stormgate haters??" then you have people posting screenshots of negative reviews on steam so that they can publicly ridicule them - accusing negative reviewers of being bots and shills. Tim Morten (on his pseudo reddit account) accused "rival RTS companies" of posting fake reviews in order to damage Stormgate's success. some of the cult members picked up on this and started blaming the staff of Battle Aces. if the FG staff had any integrity, they would have scrubbed those posts from their discord or at least spoke up, in order to dispel the rumor. I dunno, maybe I've been reading into it too much, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. besides the game being utter garbage, their paranoid fanbase is enough to turn me off
Dude! Signalis is so cool. They got $ from me when the game launched. I didn't pay any attention to it after playing it nonstop for the week it came out, but wow, nice to see they got their flowers when I checked their Steam reviews just now. Legit this is proper stuff. For me, stuff in the same vein would be Dredge or Citizen Sleeper.
Now, these are all Indie sized games when Stormgate is AA. Nevertheless, there are lots of AA studios doing well, but you truly need to earn it and work your way towards it. See SuperGiant Games. Make a 10 person game and succeed. Then make a 20 person game and succeed. THEN make a 50 person game and succeed. Bastion->Transistor->Pyre->Hades->Hades II. To start from the point they did, based on reputation only. Yeah.. grift/hubris. Odds of success were low. You can't just transplant people and assume you're carrying on right from where you left off.
I dunno. The whole situation continues to rub me the wrong way bigtime.
They can still recover, but it'd require them to admit massive mistakes, drop down to ~5 people remotely and then grind hard for a year. If they were capable of that, they would have done it already. Let's see....
Was looking around at Bonfire again yesterday and they are paying out massive $ for social media directors and community managers for a game that doesn't even exist yet. Whhhhy?
Budget does count to some degree. It’s like if you listen to a 7/10 album, and find out that the dude or dudette played every instrument. Like fuck, that’s impressive shit. But you’ll still enjoy that 8/10 that a regular band with their own specialised instruments played more
what would you enjoy more? a 10/10 album made with unwanted equipment salvaged from a garbage can? or an 8/10 album made with a blank cheque and state-of-the-art bespoke instruments? it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox. what makes art authentic is using the tools that are available to you in the present moment. Kraftwerk could have released a killer album in 1983 using analogue instruments. instead, Florian and Ralf discovered the Synclavier and chose to spend 3 long years agonizing over it (the instruction manual for the Synclavier was as thick as a phone book). meanwhile, the whole music scene rapidly changed around them. by the time they had read and understood the phone book, their upcoming album (tentatively titled Technopop) was becoming mausoleumed by the low-fi proto-techno sounds coming out of Detroit. Floran and Ralf were so obsessed with fidelity and wanting to sound more futuristic than everything else. the cost of their perfectionism was 5 long years between Computer World and what would eventually become Electric Cafe. back then, 5 years was considered an unhealthy creative hiatus. in the computer age we're living in today, the burden of choice is the very first obstacle that any producer has to overcome - and it's why nothing truly creative ever gets done without self-imposed restrictions. music has struggled to sound different since the early 2000's. we've been in a cultural recycling loop, a noise war, and a creative holocaust ever since the computer made its way into peoples living rooms. this anti-creative process resulted in 2 members of Kraftwerk leaving the group out of frustration. Kraftwerk never made another studio album until 2003 (their very last).
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning. you could postpone and linger until you've acquired the perfect, fancy crystal vial to store your lightning in. now you have very little left of your life waiting for lightning to strike again. I believe that what often separates a 10/10 album and an 8/10 album is the urgency to get it made, no matter what sacrifices you have to make in terms of fidelity. it doesn't matter what kind of media it is: music, film, writing or video game. often, the very best examples are produced under significant or even extreme budget restraints. I count money and time to be equally precious in the budget, because time is money. I find it very difficult to compartmentalize AAA, AA and indie games into their own separate categories when it comes to my own personal enjoyment of the experience. imagine if Blizzard had waited until they had the technology and budget of Stormgate before they released Brood War. imagine if Varg Vikernes had gotten a job at McDonalds so that he could afford a real microphone, instead of just recording Filosofem using the busted set of headphones that he had access to at the time. imagine if James Cameron held off on Terminator, or if Tarantino held off on Reservoir Dogs. the whole course of cultural history would have looked different.
I mean sure, I don’t especially care how the sausage is made but you’re just ignoring my entire premise by saying ‘ok but what if some bloke living on beans for 9 years made a 10/10 game, what then?’
I mean yes, that would be rather swell, but if that game existed (to my specific tastes) I’d just be playing it rather than posting bemoaning there not being that ‘killer app’, or seemingly one on the near horizon.
Say I want the ‘StarCraft killerTM’, 9/10, 10/10 game. Stormgate ain’t it, but, as impressive as a Godsworn is for being such a small team, it also ain’t it. And while I find the latter way more impressive in the abstract, that doesn’t manifest in bumping it up a few points when I’m playing it, even though I think it’s an impressive achievement (and a pretty decent too).
I’ve seen other indie games in other genres knock it out of the park, so it certainly can be done. My instinct is, it’s very difficult to do in the RTS genre, simply because folks aren’t doing it. At least in making a killer RTS with the ‘whole package’ as it were. From my understanding it’s simply a harder type of game to develop from a technical side of things to begin with, popular engines people use to great effect for all types of games aren’t quite as ready out the box for RTS. Balancing is way more complicated than it is for many other genres.
It also depends what one wants to do. Or what expectations are. Some compelling twist on the genre, some innovative, killer mode that gets existing genre fans excited, or creates new ones, absolutely it just takes some inspiration, and a small team can conceivably deliver that, and do in many a genre.
If someone wants to make, or potential fans want a Blizz-tier game (not necessarily stylistically), that starts being prohibitively difficult for very small teams, no matter their levels of passion, or how great their ideas. Varied campaigns with great presentation. Engaging core gameplay, vibrant multiplayer, good world building, good voice acting, good music, good artwork and worldbuilding. Different game modes, a fleshed-out feature suite, custom tools. Good technical performance in terms of graphical fidelity versus smoothness and system requirements, solid netcode etc.
Now, the next big step in RTS may not have to be that, ‘whole package’ kinda game. But if you do want that, you’re going to need a budget, unless your small team contains a concentration of genuine polymaths.
As for tools, I’d disagree there. The whole reason there’s such a huge variety and richness of indie games is improved tools. You can have some great ideas, vision and pour your soul into building it without also having to be an engine designer, or how to optimise things at a granular hardware level or whatever.
However, many huge games have at least some kind of budget, some kind of vision and some kind of sensible project management. The latter being a rather underrated facet. Nintendo can reliably put out a handful of absolute bangers every console generation because they’ve got it down to a tee.
Are there many good modern CRPGs on low budgets? Absolutely there’s some quality entries there. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the runaway crossover hit, because Larian had all three of the aforementioned.
Hideo Kojima is about as an idiosyncratic auteur as exists in game development outside of indies, you don’t get as innovative and distinctive a series as MGS without him, but you also don’t get an MGS without Konami giving him money.
I wasn't disagreeing with your premise at all. just felt like going on a ramble
in 2020, a modern AAA game with a release window of maybe 4-5 years would have had a budget of $50-150 million on average, including the cost of both development and marketing. those are the kind of funds you'd need for "the whole package" back when Frost Giant started up - and the cost just shoots up and up for every year that passes by.
by January 2022, Frost Giant had raised $35 million in seed funding and series A investment. they also had a few million from Kickstarter. honestly, impressive fundraising for a start-up company. it was an appropriate level of funding for what their stated goals were. there's a "core values" section that's been up on their website since the day it went live:
"Strategically expand the audience. First appeal to the core audience, then also provide a great experience to strategy gamers at large. Establish a strong main before taking the natural."
it's implicit that the core audience of Blizzard-style RTS are people who play competitive 1v1 and who like to observe competitive 1v1 as an esport.
my expectation was that FG would release a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode before they attempted to branch out into other things: like the mayhem mode, the custom editor, the co-op mode, the campaign, the Blizzard-tier cinematics and all the rest of it. I've ordered those features into a release pipeline that makes the most sense if their core values are to be taken seriously. 1v1 appeals to the core RTS crowd. mayhem mode appeals to the DOTA / RTS crossover crowd, which is enormous. you get those 2 things out the door before you even dream about the other stuff. bit by bit, you expand the game out towards the more pedestrian strategy game enjoyers.
what they've done is the complete opposite of that. instead of establishing a strong main, they've recklessly gone out into the map and taken a nexus first without a wall-off. they've also taken a 3rd hatch before pool, and a cheeky ninja command center way out in the corner of the map, before even making a single army unit. a strong main would have been a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode with all the units available to play. the fact that we don't even have all the units that are planned for 1v1 is proof that FG stretched themselves too thin and bit off way more than they could chew.
I'm sure that a well-polished F2P esport RTS that had galvanized the wc3 / sc2 core would have been enough to secure investment for ambitious expansion. by now, they could have had thousands of people playing those 2 core game modes: 1v1 and Mayhem. in the meantime, they could have been monetizing both of those game modes with cosmetics.
Stormgate is a failure because the development suffers from irresponsible allocations of time, energy and money. you don't need $100 million to make a decent core game mode. someone in the leadership role is running the company with incredibly poor signal-to-noise control. yeah, let's make a Blizz-tier campaign for one of the three races before we've even designed all of the multiplayer units. great idea the company making the next big real time strategy game does not seem to be very good at strategy
Despite lacking cohesion, the Infernal faction design was more interesting and had more charm than it does now (how is this even possible)
A number of features were still not implemented so they could have been good, we didn't know yet
3rd faction wasn't implemented yet, people had high hopes
Campaign wasn't implemented, people had high hopes
I admire some of your optimism, Roger. But these ones above are the ones that stand out for me. Stormgate was always and only ever built on a combination of hype and hope. FG cashed in their reputations for cash. Maybe intentionally, but just hubris, but it happened. TimC and TimM were both 5 years from retirement [no proof, just speculating based on 55 year old cali software guys] -- It's not a coincidence.
Here's a copy-paste of something I posted on the Stormgate subreddit.
All of these ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot companies feel like they're god's gift to game development and they have ALL failed for that reason. They don't know how to adjust and continue to work as they used to when they worked for a company that printed money. Let's fly consultants out to test our game. Let's buy audio equipment suitable for Hans Zimmer to record our OST. Let's have 2 concept art artists on staff who don't add direct value to the product. Let's ensure we have a 5 person Legal & HR department for our small team. Let's hire a personal chef to make free lunches in our posh office space. Let's have team outings to the Dodger's game to "recharge". Meanwhile, the actual game is mediocre and not improving. These guys are powderpuffs.
Others are doing a lot more, with less. It was a passion project, with nothing but a passion for living large on other peoples' money. The 5 year gravy train is come to an end.
https://bonfirestudios.com/ is another example of people burning $40M and coming up with nothing. Jury is still out on that one, but their playtest is in a couple of weeks but it also looks very sus for a 5 year dev cycle with 30-40 people.
you are a poet. that is a quality roast and puts into words the vitriol that I share towards the leadership at FG
the next great RTS will not be made by tired ex-Blizzard devs and I doubt it will come from an orange county / silicon valley studio either. that part of the world seems to attract the most out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt individuals in the industry. they have nothing of value to offer anyone who lives outside their bubble
Ya i agree. There's a huge bubble over there. I've worked on game dev a bit myself, i have some friends who do it full time. They've been sharing apartments, working from their bedrooms and living on ramen sometimes to make the numbers add up. It's a completely different world to giving yourself half a million a year plus stock and all of the other stuff from the whiteboard phase of development. The contrast feels quite insulting. It shouldn't be that difficult to get by, but FG's spend was 10-100x greater per employee and that's something that i find difficult to imagine, let alone justify.
Zerospace seems closer to the indie stuff than to FG, and they seem to be doing much better for it - although there are some issues like UE4 RTS not performing well and they don't really have the resources to fix those foundational issues.
my favourite game of the decade (so far) is SIGNALIS, by rose-engine. that's a team of 2 illustrators / game designers based in Hamburg, Germany. they spent 8 years making what would become one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. SIGNALIS is incredibly rich in lore, style and substance. 2 devs, in a bedroom somewhere, with a budget consisting of ramen and passion. nobody knows who the devs are. their real names, what they look or sound like is a mystery. in the years since the game was released, they've only communicated via memes and only ever did 1 or written interviews and that's it. true artists. I bought the game 3 times and gifted 2 copies to friends. that kinda passion just impresses the hell out of me
when I look at efforts like that and compare it to the $40 million dollar slop of Stormgate, it makes me feel a little sick. they're a bunch of posers. there is no artistic value to Stormgate. the lore and the world-building just isn't there, because nobody at FG cares about it. the work done by the external music composers is alright, but yeah - the souls of every dev working in orange county studio have been bought, sold and paid for.
Tim Morten and friends are touting their game in such an annoyingly entitled way - like they automatically deserve recognition and respect from the RTS community. they want all the sc2 / wc3 influencers to rally behind them, despite having very little of value to offer. I'm lurking in the Stormgate discord and they've managed to cultivate this small, cultish fanbase. it's non-stop posts like, "when's Grubby going to stream some of our game?? why hasn't Artosis played the new patch yet? what's wrong with them?! are they Stormgate haters??" then you have people posting screenshots of negative reviews on steam so that they can publicly ridicule them - accusing negative reviewers of being bots and shills. Tim Morten (on his pseudo reddit account) accused "rival RTS companies" of posting fake reviews in order to damage Stormgate's success. some of the cult members picked up on this and started blaming the staff of Battle Aces. if the FG staff had any integrity, they would have scrubbed those posts from their discord or at least spoke up, in order to dispel the rumor. I dunno, maybe I've been reading into it too much, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. besides the game being utter garbage, their paranoid fanbase is enough to turn me off
Dude! Signalis is so cool. They got $ from me when the game launched. I didn't pay any attention to it after playing it nonstop for the week it came out, but wow, nice to see they got their flowers when I checked their Steam reviews just now. Legit this is proper stuff. For me, stuff in the same vein would be Dredge or Citizen Sleeper.
Now, these are all Indie sized games when Stormgate is AA. Nevertheless, there are lots of AA studios doing well, but you truly need to earn it and work your way towards it. See SuperGiant Games. Make a 10 person game and succeed. Then make a 20 person game and succeed. THEN make a 50 person game and succeed. Bastion->Transistor->Pyre->Hades->Hades II. To start from the point they did, based on reputation only. Yeah.. grift/hubris. Odds of success were low. You can't just transplant people and assume you're carrying on right from where you left off.
I dunno. The whole situation continues to rub me the wrong way bigtime.
They can still recover, but it'd require them to admit massive mistakes, drop down to ~5 people remotely and then grind hard for a year. If they were capable of that, they would have done it already. Let's see....
Was looking around at Bonfire again yesterday and they are paying out massive $ for social media directors and community managers for a game that doesn't even exist yet. Whhhhy?
Budget does count to some degree. It’s like if you listen to a 7/10 album, and find out that the dude or dudette played every instrument. Like fuck, that’s impressive shit. But you’ll still enjoy that 8/10 that a regular band with their own specialised instruments played more
what would you enjoy more? a 10/10 album made with unwanted equipment salvaged from a garbage can? or an 8/10 album made with a blank cheque and state-of-the-art bespoke instruments? it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox. what makes art authentic is using the tools that are available to you in the present moment. Kraftwerk could have released a killer album in 1983 using analogue instruments. instead, Florian and Ralf discovered the Synclavier and chose to spend 3 long years agonizing over it (the instruction manual for the Synclavier was as thick as a phone book). meanwhile, the whole music scene rapidly changed around them. by the time they had read and understood the phone book, their upcoming album (tentatively titled Technopop) was becoming mausoleumed by the low-fi proto-techno sounds coming out of Detroit. Floran and Ralf were so obsessed with fidelity and wanting to sound more futuristic than everything else. the cost of their perfectionism was 5 long years between Computer World and what would eventually become Electric Cafe. back then, 5 years was considered an unhealthy creative hiatus. in the computer age we're living in today, the burden of choice is the very first obstacle that any producer has to overcome - and it's why nothing truly creative ever gets done without self-imposed restrictions. music has struggled to sound different since the early 2000's. we've been in a cultural recycling loop, a noise war, and a creative holocaust ever since the computer made its way into peoples living rooms. this anti-creative process resulted in 2 members of Kraftwerk leaving the group out of frustration. Kraftwerk never made another studio album until 2003 (their very last).
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning. you could postpone and linger until you've acquired the perfect, fancy crystal vial to store your lightning in. now you have very little left of your life waiting for lightning to strike again. I believe that what often separates a 10/10 album and an 8/10 album is the urgency to get it made, no matter what sacrifices you have to make in terms of fidelity. it doesn't matter what kind of media it is: music, film, writing or video game. often, the very best examples are produced under significant or even extreme budget restraints. I count money and time to be equally precious in the budget, because time is money. I find it very difficult to compartmentalize AAA, AA and indie games into their own separate categories when it comes to my own personal enjoyment of the experience. imagine if Blizzard had waited until they had the technology and budget of Stormgate before they released Brood War. imagine if Varg Vikernes had gotten a job at McDonalds so that he could afford a real microphone, instead of just recording Filosofem using the busted set of headphones that he had access to at the time. imagine if James Cameron held off on Terminator, or if Tarantino held off on Reservoir Dogs. the whole course of cultural history would have looked different.
I mean sure, I don’t especially care how the sausage is made but you’re just ignoring my entire premise by saying ‘ok but what if some bloke living on beans for 9 years made a 10/10 game, what then?’
I mean yes, that would be rather swell, but if that game existed (to my specific tastes) I’d just be playing it rather than posting bemoaning there not being that ‘killer app’, or seemingly one on the near horizon.
Say I want the ‘StarCraft killerTM’, 9/10, 10/10 game. Stormgate ain’t it, but, as impressive as a Godsworn is for being such a small team, it also ain’t it. And while I find the latter way more impressive in the abstract, that doesn’t manifest in bumping it up a few points when I’m playing it, even though I think it’s an impressive achievement (and a pretty decent too).
I’ve seen other indie games in other genres knock it out of the park, so it certainly can be done. My instinct is, it’s very difficult to do in the RTS genre, simply because folks aren’t doing it. At least in making a killer RTS with the ‘whole package’ as it were. From my understanding it’s simply a harder type of game to develop from a technical side of things to begin with, popular engines people use to great effect for all types of games aren’t quite as ready out the box for RTS. Balancing is way more complicated than it is for many other genres.
It also depends what one wants to do. Or what expectations are. Some compelling twist on the genre, some innovative, killer mode that gets existing genre fans excited, or creates new ones, absolutely it just takes some inspiration, and a small team can conceivably deliver that, and do in many a genre.
If someone wants to make, or potential fans want a Blizz-tier game (not necessarily stylistically), that starts being prohibitively difficult for very small teams, no matter their levels of passion, or how great their ideas. Varied campaigns with great presentation. Engaging core gameplay, vibrant multiplayer, good world building, good voice acting, good music, good artwork and worldbuilding. Different game modes, a fleshed-out feature suite, custom tools. Good technical performance in terms of graphical fidelity versus smoothness and system requirements, solid netcode etc.
Now, the next big step in RTS may not have to be that, ‘whole package’ kinda game. But if you do want that, you’re going to need a budget, unless your small team contains a concentration of genuine polymaths.
As for tools, I’d disagree there. The whole reason there’s such a huge variety and richness of indie games is improved tools. You can have some great ideas, vision and pour your soul into building it without also having to be an engine designer, or how to optimise things at a granular hardware level or whatever.
However, many huge games have at least some kind of budget, some kind of vision and some kind of sensible project management. The latter being a rather underrated facet. Nintendo can reliably put out a handful of absolute bangers every console generation because they’ve got it down to a tee.
Are there many good modern CRPGs on low budgets? Absolutely there’s some quality entries there. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the runaway crossover hit, because Larian had all three of the aforementioned.
Hideo Kojima is about as an idiosyncratic auteur as exists in game development outside of indies, you don’t get as innovative and distinctive a series as MGS without him, but you also don’t get an MGS without Konami giving him money.
I wasn't disagreeing with your premise at all. just felt like going on a ramble
in 2020, a modern AAA game with a release window of maybe 4-5 years would have had a budget of $50-150 million on average, including the cost of both development and marketing. those are the kind of funds you'd need for "the whole package" back when Frost Giant started up - and the cost just shoots up and up for every year that passes by.
by January 2022, Frost Giant had raised $35 million in seed funding and series A investment. they also had a few million from Kickstarter. honestly, impressive fundraising for a start-up company. it was an appropriate level of funding for what their stated goals were. there's a "core values" section that's been up on their website since the day it went live:
"Strategically expand the audience. First appeal to the core audience, then also provide a great experience to strategy gamers at large. Establish a strong main before taking the natural."
it's implicit that the core audience of Blizzard-style RTS are people who play competitive 1v1 and who like to observe competitive 1v1 as an esport.
my expectation was that FG would release a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode before they attempted to branch out into other things: like the mayhem mode, the custom editor, the co-op mode, the campaign, the Blizzard-tier cinematics and all the rest of it. I've ordered those features into a release pipeline that makes the most sense if their core values are to be taken seriously. 1v1 appeals to the core RTS crowd. mayhem mode appeals to the DOTA / RTS crossover crowd, which is enormous. you get those 2 things out the door before you even dream about the other stuff. bit by bit, you expand the game out towards the more pedestrian strategy game enjoyers.
what they've done is the complete opposite of that. instead of establishing a strong main, they've recklessly gone out into the map and taken a nexus first without a wall-off. they've also taken a 3rd hatch before pool, and a cheeky ninja command center way out in the corner of the map, before even making a single army unit. a strong main would have been a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode with all the units available to play. the fact that we don't even have all the units that are planned for 1v1 is proof that FG stretched themselves too thin and bit off way more than they could chew.
I'm sure that a well-polished F2P esport RTS that had galvanized the wc3 / sc2 core would have been enough to secure investment for ambitious expansion. by now, they could have had thousands of people playing those 2 core game modes: 1v1 and Mayhem. in the meantime, they could have been monetizing both of those game modes with cosmetics.
Stormgate is a failure because the development suffers from irresponsible allocations of time, energy and money. you don't need $100 million to make a decent core game mode. someone in the leadership role is running the company with incredibly poor signal-to-noise control. yeah, let's make a Blizz-tier campaign for one of the three races before we've even designed all of the multiplayer units. great idea the company making the next big real time strategy game does not seem to be very good at strategy
Aye can’t disagree with any of that whatever, and your ramble was an entertaining one!
Quite amusing to see that original set of core values and the obvious unravelling of it, presumably for all the reasons we previously nodded on re: silicon valley // ex-Blizzard.
Will be very interesting to see their next move, although admittedly I'm almost done giving a shit after my kneejerk annoyance in them ripping me off and trying out the 5/10 fun, 2/10 value campaign last week.
On August 10 2025 10:41 Gescom wrote: [quote] I admire some of your optimism, Roger. But these ones above are the ones that stand out for me. Stormgate was always and only ever built on a combination of hype and hope. FG cashed in their reputations for cash. Maybe intentionally, but just hubris, but it happened. TimC and TimM were both 5 years from retirement [no proof, just speculating based on 55 year old cali software guys] -- It's not a coincidence.
Here's a copy-paste of something I posted on the Stormgate subreddit.
All of these ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot companies feel like they're god's gift to game development and they have ALL failed for that reason. They don't know how to adjust and continue to work as they used to when they worked for a company that printed money. Let's fly consultants out to test our game. Let's buy audio equipment suitable for Hans Zimmer to record our OST. Let's have 2 concept art artists on staff who don't add direct value to the product. Let's ensure we have a 5 person Legal & HR department for our small team. Let's hire a personal chef to make free lunches in our posh office space. Let's have team outings to the Dodger's game to "recharge". Meanwhile, the actual game is mediocre and not improving. These guys are powderpuffs.
Others are doing a lot more, with less. It was a passion project, with nothing but a passion for living large on other peoples' money. The 5 year gravy train is come to an end.
https://bonfirestudios.com/ is another example of people burning $40M and coming up with nothing. Jury is still out on that one, but their playtest is in a couple of weeks but it also looks very sus for a 5 year dev cycle with 30-40 people.
you are a poet. that is a quality roast and puts into words the vitriol that I share towards the leadership at FG
the next great RTS will not be made by tired ex-Blizzard devs and I doubt it will come from an orange county / silicon valley studio either. that part of the world seems to attract the most out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt individuals in the industry. they have nothing of value to offer anyone who lives outside their bubble
Ya i agree. There's a huge bubble over there. I've worked on game dev a bit myself, i have some friends who do it full time. They've been sharing apartments, working from their bedrooms and living on ramen sometimes to make the numbers add up. It's a completely different world to giving yourself half a million a year plus stock and all of the other stuff from the whiteboard phase of development. The contrast feels quite insulting. It shouldn't be that difficult to get by, but FG's spend was 10-100x greater per employee and that's something that i find difficult to imagine, let alone justify.
Zerospace seems closer to the indie stuff than to FG, and they seem to be doing much better for it - although there are some issues like UE4 RTS not performing well and they don't really have the resources to fix those foundational issues.
my favourite game of the decade (so far) is SIGNALIS, by rose-engine. that's a team of 2 illustrators / game designers based in Hamburg, Germany. they spent 8 years making what would become one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. SIGNALIS is incredibly rich in lore, style and substance. 2 devs, in a bedroom somewhere, with a budget consisting of ramen and passion. nobody knows who the devs are. their real names, what they look or sound like is a mystery. in the years since the game was released, they've only communicated via memes and only ever did 1 or written interviews and that's it. true artists. I bought the game 3 times and gifted 2 copies to friends. that kinda passion just impresses the hell out of me
when I look at efforts like that and compare it to the $40 million dollar slop of Stormgate, it makes me feel a little sick. they're a bunch of posers. there is no artistic value to Stormgate. the lore and the world-building just isn't there, because nobody at FG cares about it. the work done by the external music composers is alright, but yeah - the souls of every dev working in orange county studio have been bought, sold and paid for.
Tim Morten and friends are touting their game in such an annoyingly entitled way - like they automatically deserve recognition and respect from the RTS community. they want all the sc2 / wc3 influencers to rally behind them, despite having very little of value to offer. I'm lurking in the Stormgate discord and they've managed to cultivate this small, cultish fanbase. it's non-stop posts like, "when's Grubby going to stream some of our game?? why hasn't Artosis played the new patch yet? what's wrong with them?! are they Stormgate haters??" then you have people posting screenshots of negative reviews on steam so that they can publicly ridicule them - accusing negative reviewers of being bots and shills. Tim Morten (on his pseudo reddit account) accused "rival RTS companies" of posting fake reviews in order to damage Stormgate's success. some of the cult members picked up on this and started blaming the staff of Battle Aces. if the FG staff had any integrity, they would have scrubbed those posts from their discord or at least spoke up, in order to dispel the rumor. I dunno, maybe I've been reading into it too much, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. besides the game being utter garbage, their paranoid fanbase is enough to turn me off
Dude! Signalis is so cool. They got $ from me when the game launched. I didn't pay any attention to it after playing it nonstop for the week it came out, but wow, nice to see they got their flowers when I checked their Steam reviews just now. Legit this is proper stuff. For me, stuff in the same vein would be Dredge or Citizen Sleeper.
Now, these are all Indie sized games when Stormgate is AA. Nevertheless, there are lots of AA studios doing well, but you truly need to earn it and work your way towards it. See SuperGiant Games. Make a 10 person game and succeed. Then make a 20 person game and succeed. THEN make a 50 person game and succeed. Bastion->Transistor->Pyre->Hades->Hades II. To start from the point they did, based on reputation only. Yeah.. grift/hubris. Odds of success were low. You can't just transplant people and assume you're carrying on right from where you left off.
I dunno. The whole situation continues to rub me the wrong way bigtime.
They can still recover, but it'd require them to admit massive mistakes, drop down to ~5 people remotely and then grind hard for a year. If they were capable of that, they would have done it already. Let's see....
Was looking around at Bonfire again yesterday and they are paying out massive $ for social media directors and community managers for a game that doesn't even exist yet. Whhhhy?
Budget does count to some degree. It’s like if you listen to a 7/10 album, and find out that the dude or dudette played every instrument. Like fuck, that’s impressive shit. But you’ll still enjoy that 8/10 that a regular band with their own specialised instruments played more
what would you enjoy more? a 10/10 album made with unwanted equipment salvaged from a garbage can? or an 8/10 album made with a blank cheque and state-of-the-art bespoke instruments? it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox. what makes art authentic is using the tools that are available to you in the present moment. Kraftwerk could have released a killer album in 1983 using analogue instruments. instead, Florian and Ralf discovered the Synclavier and chose to spend 3 long years agonizing over it (the instruction manual for the Synclavier was as thick as a phone book). meanwhile, the whole music scene rapidly changed around them. by the time they had read and understood the phone book, their upcoming album (tentatively titled Technopop) was becoming mausoleumed by the low-fi proto-techno sounds coming out of Detroit. Floran and Ralf were so obsessed with fidelity and wanting to sound more futuristic than everything else. the cost of their perfectionism was 5 long years between Computer World and what would eventually become Electric Cafe. back then, 5 years was considered an unhealthy creative hiatus. in the computer age we're living in today, the burden of choice is the very first obstacle that any producer has to overcome - and it's why nothing truly creative ever gets done without self-imposed restrictions. music has struggled to sound different since the early 2000's. we've been in a cultural recycling loop, a noise war, and a creative holocaust ever since the computer made its way into peoples living rooms. this anti-creative process resulted in 2 members of Kraftwerk leaving the group out of frustration. Kraftwerk never made another studio album until 2003 (their very last).
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning. you could postpone and linger until you've acquired the perfect, fancy crystal vial to store your lightning in. now you have very little left of your life waiting for lightning to strike again. I believe that what often separates a 10/10 album and an 8/10 album is the urgency to get it made, no matter what sacrifices you have to make in terms of fidelity. it doesn't matter what kind of media it is: music, film, writing or video game. often, the very best examples are produced under significant or even extreme budget restraints. I count money and time to be equally precious in the budget, because time is money. I find it very difficult to compartmentalize AAA, AA and indie games into their own separate categories when it comes to my own personal enjoyment of the experience. imagine if Blizzard had waited until they had the technology and budget of Stormgate before they released Brood War. imagine if Varg Vikernes had gotten a job at McDonalds so that he could afford a real microphone, instead of just recording Filosofem using the busted set of headphones that he had access to at the time. imagine if James Cameron held off on Terminator, or if Tarantino held off on Reservoir Dogs. the whole course of cultural history would have looked different.
I mean sure, I don’t especially care how the sausage is made but you’re just ignoring my entire premise by saying ‘ok but what if some bloke living on beans for 9 years made a 10/10 game, what then?’
I mean yes, that would be rather swell, but if that game existed (to my specific tastes) I’d just be playing it rather than posting bemoaning there not being that ‘killer app’, or seemingly one on the near horizon.
Say I want the ‘StarCraft killerTM’, 9/10, 10/10 game. Stormgate ain’t it, but, as impressive as a Godsworn is for being such a small team, it also ain’t it. And while I find the latter way more impressive in the abstract, that doesn’t manifest in bumping it up a few points when I’m playing it, even though I think it’s an impressive achievement (and a pretty decent too).
I’ve seen other indie games in other genres knock it out of the park, so it certainly can be done. My instinct is, it’s very difficult to do in the RTS genre, simply because folks aren’t doing it. At least in making a killer RTS with the ‘whole package’ as it were. From my understanding it’s simply a harder type of game to develop from a technical side of things to begin with, popular engines people use to great effect for all types of games aren’t quite as ready out the box for RTS. Balancing is way more complicated than it is for many other genres.
It also depends what one wants to do. Or what expectations are. Some compelling twist on the genre, some innovative, killer mode that gets existing genre fans excited, or creates new ones, absolutely it just takes some inspiration, and a small team can conceivably deliver that, and do in many a genre.
If someone wants to make, or potential fans want a Blizz-tier game (not necessarily stylistically), that starts being prohibitively difficult for very small teams, no matter their levels of passion, or how great their ideas. Varied campaigns with great presentation. Engaging core gameplay, vibrant multiplayer, good world building, good voice acting, good music, good artwork and worldbuilding. Different game modes, a fleshed-out feature suite, custom tools. Good technical performance in terms of graphical fidelity versus smoothness and system requirements, solid netcode etc.
Now, the next big step in RTS may not have to be that, ‘whole package’ kinda game. But if you do want that, you’re going to need a budget, unless your small team contains a concentration of genuine polymaths.
As for tools, I’d disagree there. The whole reason there’s such a huge variety and richness of indie games is improved tools. You can have some great ideas, vision and pour your soul into building it without also having to be an engine designer, or how to optimise things at a granular hardware level or whatever.
However, many huge games have at least some kind of budget, some kind of vision and some kind of sensible project management. The latter being a rather underrated facet. Nintendo can reliably put out a handful of absolute bangers every console generation because they’ve got it down to a tee.
Are there many good modern CRPGs on low budgets? Absolutely there’s some quality entries there. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the runaway crossover hit, because Larian had all three of the aforementioned.
Hideo Kojima is about as an idiosyncratic auteur as exists in game development outside of indies, you don’t get as innovative and distinctive a series as MGS without him, but you also don’t get an MGS without Konami giving him money.
I wasn't disagreeing with your premise at all. just felt like going on a ramble
in 2020, a modern AAA game with a release window of maybe 4-5 years would have had a budget of $50-150 million on average, including the cost of both development and marketing. those are the kind of funds you'd need for "the whole package" back when Frost Giant started up - and the cost just shoots up and up for every year that passes by.
by January 2022, Frost Giant had raised $35 million in seed funding and series A investment. they also had a few million from Kickstarter. honestly, impressive fundraising for a start-up company. it was an appropriate level of funding for what their stated goals were. there's a "core values" section that's been up on their website since the day it went live:
"Strategically expand the audience. First appeal to the core audience, then also provide a great experience to strategy gamers at large. Establish a strong main before taking the natural."
it's implicit that the core audience of Blizzard-style RTS are people who play competitive 1v1 and who like to observe competitive 1v1 as an esport.
my expectation was that FG would release a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode before they attempted to branch out into other things: like the mayhem mode, the custom editor, the co-op mode, the campaign, the Blizzard-tier cinematics and all the rest of it. I've ordered those features into a release pipeline that makes the most sense if their core values are to be taken seriously. 1v1 appeals to the core RTS crowd. mayhem mode appeals to the DOTA / RTS crossover crowd, which is enormous. you get those 2 things out the door before you even dream about the other stuff. bit by bit, you expand the game out towards the more pedestrian strategy game enjoyers.
what they've done is the complete opposite of that. instead of establishing a strong main, they've recklessly gone out into the map and taken a nexus first without a wall-off. they've also taken a 3rd hatch before pool, and a cheeky ninja command center way out in the corner of the map, before even making a single army unit. a strong main would have been a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode with all the units available to play. the fact that we don't even have all the units that are planned for 1v1 is proof that FG stretched themselves too thin and bit off way more than they could chew.
I'm sure that a well-polished F2P esport RTS that had galvanized the wc3 / sc2 core would have been enough to secure investment for ambitious expansion. by now, they could have had thousands of people playing those 2 core game modes: 1v1 and Mayhem. in the meantime, they could have been monetizing both of those game modes with cosmetics.
Stormgate is a failure because the development suffers from irresponsible allocations of time, energy and money. you don't need $100 million to make a decent core game mode. someone in the leadership role is running the company with incredibly poor signal-to-noise control. yeah, let's make a Blizz-tier campaign for one of the three races before we've even designed all of the multiplayer units. great idea the company making the next big real time strategy game does not seem to be very good at strategy
Aye can’t disagree with any of that whatever, and your ramble was an entertaining one!
Yep I think what they needed to do in a 3-year span - given their spending - was to establish one (max 2) succesful game-modes that offered something clearly superior over the alternatives. If they could have done that they could have had several thousands concurrent players, and it would probably have been enough for another investment round.
However, as became clear to me after going hundreds of Tim Mortens "secret" reddit account - he thought the game was in a much better state than it is". He had no idea how poorly the early release would have been received. I know in hindsight he has said his biggest regret was not downplaying expectations prior to early release.
But I think he genuinely thought that at least the 1v1 gameplay was on par with WOL release gameplay. And he probably also underestimate how terrible the campaign was early release.
Despite lacking cohesion, the Infernal faction design was more interesting and had more charm than it does now (how is this even possible)
A number of features were still not implemented so they could have been good, we didn't know yet
3rd faction wasn't implemented yet, people had high hopes
Campaign wasn't implemented, people had high hopes
I admire some of your optimism, Roger. But these ones above are the ones that stand out for me. Stormgate was always and only ever built on a combination of hype and hope. FG cashed in their reputations for cash. Maybe intentionally, but just hubris, but it happened. TimC and TimM were both 5 years from retirement [no proof, just speculating based on 55 year old cali software guys] -- It's not a coincidence.
Here's a copy-paste of something I posted on the Stormgate subreddit.
All of these ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot companies feel like they're god's gift to game development and they have ALL failed for that reason. They don't know how to adjust and continue to work as they used to when they worked for a company that printed money. Let's fly consultants out to test our game. Let's buy audio equipment suitable for Hans Zimmer to record our OST. Let's have 2 concept art artists on staff who don't add direct value to the product. Let's ensure we have a 5 person Legal & HR department for our small team. Let's hire a personal chef to make free lunches in our posh office space. Let's have team outings to the Dodger's game to "recharge". Meanwhile, the actual game is mediocre and not improving. These guys are powderpuffs.
Others are doing a lot more, with less. It was a passion project, with nothing but a passion for living large on other peoples' money. The 5 year gravy train is come to an end.
https://bonfirestudios.com/ is another example of people burning $40M and coming up with nothing. Jury is still out on that one, but their playtest is in a couple of weeks but it also looks very sus for a 5 year dev cycle with 30-40 people.
you are a poet. that is a quality roast and puts into words the vitriol that I share towards the leadership at FG
the next great RTS will not be made by tired ex-Blizzard devs and I doubt it will come from an orange county / silicon valley studio either. that part of the world seems to attract the most out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt individuals in the industry. they have nothing of value to offer anyone who lives outside their bubble
Ya i agree. There's a huge bubble over there. I've worked on game dev a bit myself, i have some friends who do it full time. They've been sharing apartments, working from their bedrooms and living on ramen sometimes to make the numbers add up. It's a completely different world to giving yourself half a million a year plus stock and all of the other stuff from the whiteboard phase of development. The contrast feels quite insulting. It shouldn't be that difficult to get by, but FG's spend was 10-100x greater per employee and that's something that i find difficult to imagine, let alone justify.
Zerospace seems closer to the indie stuff than to FG, and they seem to be doing much better for it - although there are some issues like UE4 RTS not performing well and they don't really have the resources to fix those foundational issues.
my favourite game of the decade (so far) is SIGNALIS, by rose-engine. that's a team of 2 illustrators / game designers based in Hamburg, Germany. they spent 8 years making what would become one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. SIGNALIS is incredibly rich in lore, style and substance. 2 devs, in a bedroom somewhere, with a budget consisting of ramen and passion. nobody knows who the devs are. their real names, what they look or sound like is a mystery. in the years since the game was released, they've only communicated via memes and only ever did 1 or written interviews and that's it. true artists. I bought the game 3 times and gifted 2 copies to friends. that kinda passion just impresses the hell out of me
when I look at efforts like that and compare it to the $40 million dollar slop of Stormgate, it makes me feel a little sick. they're a bunch of posers. there is no artistic value to Stormgate. the lore and the world-building just isn't there, because nobody at FG cares about it. the work done by the external music composers is alright, but yeah - the souls of every dev working in orange county studio have been bought, sold and paid for.
Tim Morten and friends are touting their game in such an annoyingly entitled way - like they automatically deserve recognition and respect from the RTS community. they want all the sc2 / wc3 influencers to rally behind them, despite having very little of value to offer. I'm lurking in the Stormgate discord and they've managed to cultivate this small, cultish fanbase. it's non-stop posts like, "when's Grubby going to stream some of our game?? why hasn't Artosis played the new patch yet? what's wrong with them?! are they Stormgate haters??" then you have people posting screenshots of negative reviews on steam so that they can publicly ridicule them - accusing negative reviewers of being bots and shills. Tim Morten (on his pseudo reddit account) accused "rival RTS companies" of posting fake reviews in order to damage Stormgate's success. some of the cult members picked up on this and started blaming the staff of Battle Aces. if the FG staff had any integrity, they would have scrubbed those posts from their discord or at least spoke up, in order to dispel the rumor. I dunno, maybe I've been reading into it too much, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. besides the game being utter garbage, their paranoid fanbase is enough to turn me off
Dude! Signalis is so cool. They got $ from me when the game launched. I didn't pay any attention to it after playing it nonstop for the week it came out, but wow, nice to see they got their flowers when I checked their Steam reviews just now. Legit this is proper stuff. For me, stuff in the same vein would be Dredge or Citizen Sleeper.
Now, these are all Indie sized games when Stormgate is AA. Nevertheless, there are lots of AA studios doing well, but you truly need to earn it and work your way towards it. See SuperGiant Games. Make a 10 person game and succeed. Then make a 20 person game and succeed. THEN make a 50 person game and succeed. Bastion->Transistor->Pyre->Hades->Hades II. To start from the point they did, based on reputation only. Yeah.. grift/hubris. Odds of success were low. You can't just transplant people and assume you're carrying on right from where you left off.
I dunno. The whole situation continues to rub me the wrong way bigtime.
They can still recover, but it'd require them to admit massive mistakes, drop down to ~5 people remotely and then grind hard for a year. If they were capable of that, they would have done it already. Let's see....
Was looking around at Bonfire again yesterday and they are paying out massive $ for social media directors and community managers for a game that doesn't even exist yet. Whhhhy?
Budget does count to some degree. It’s like if you listen to a 7/10 album, and find out that the dude or dudette played every instrument. Like fuck, that’s impressive shit. But you’ll still enjoy that 8/10 that a regular band with their own specialised instruments played more
what would you enjoy more? a 10/10 album made with unwanted equipment salvaged from a garbage can? or an 8/10 album made with a blank cheque and state-of-the-art bespoke instruments? it's not how fancy your Parker pen is. it's how confidently you can write your name using the leaky BIC biro that your momma packed in your lunchbox. what makes art authentic is using the tools that are available to you in the present moment. Kraftwerk could have released a killer album in 1983 using analogue instruments. instead, Florian and Ralf discovered the Synclavier and chose to spend 3 long years agonizing over it (the instruction manual for the Synclavier was as thick as a phone book). meanwhile, the whole music scene rapidly changed around them. by the time they had read and understood the phone book, their upcoming album (tentatively titled Technopop) was becoming mausoleumed by the low-fi proto-techno sounds coming out of Detroit. Floran and Ralf were so obsessed with fidelity and wanting to sound more futuristic than everything else. the cost of their perfectionism was 5 long years between Computer World and what would eventually become Electric Cafe. back then, 5 years was considered an unhealthy creative hiatus. in the computer age we're living in today, the burden of choice is the very first obstacle that any producer has to overcome - and it's why nothing truly creative ever gets done without self-imposed restrictions. music has struggled to sound different since the early 2000's. we've been in a cultural recycling loop, a noise war, and a creative holocaust ever since the computer made its way into peoples living rooms. this anti-creative process resulted in 2 members of Kraftwerk leaving the group out of frustration. Kraftwerk never made another studio album until 2003 (their very last).
it really doesn't matter what kind of bottle you use to capture lightning. you could postpone and linger until you've acquired the perfect, fancy crystal vial to store your lightning in. now you have very little left of your life waiting for lightning to strike again. I believe that what often separates a 10/10 album and an 8/10 album is the urgency to get it made, no matter what sacrifices you have to make in terms of fidelity. it doesn't matter what kind of media it is: music, film, writing or video game. often, the very best examples are produced under significant or even extreme budget restraints. I count money and time to be equally precious in the budget, because time is money. I find it very difficult to compartmentalize AAA, AA and indie games into their own separate categories when it comes to my own personal enjoyment of the experience. imagine if Blizzard had waited until they had the technology and budget of Stormgate before they released Brood War. imagine if Varg Vikernes had gotten a job at McDonalds so that he could afford a real microphone, instead of just recording Filosofem using the busted set of headphones that he had access to at the time. imagine if James Cameron held off on Terminator, or if Tarantino held off on Reservoir Dogs. the whole course of cultural history would have looked different.
I mean sure, I don’t especially care how the sausage is made but you’re just ignoring my entire premise by saying ‘ok but what if some bloke living on beans for 9 years made a 10/10 game, what then?’
I mean yes, that would be rather swell, but if that game existed (to my specific tastes) I’d just be playing it rather than posting bemoaning there not being that ‘killer app’, or seemingly one on the near horizon.
Say I want the ‘StarCraft killerTM’, 9/10, 10/10 game. Stormgate ain’t it, but, as impressive as a Godsworn is for being such a small team, it also ain’t it. And while I find the latter way more impressive in the abstract, that doesn’t manifest in bumping it up a few points when I’m playing it, even though I think it’s an impressive achievement (and a pretty decent too).
I’ve seen other indie games in other genres knock it out of the park, so it certainly can be done. My instinct is, it’s very difficult to do in the RTS genre, simply because folks aren’t doing it. At least in making a killer RTS with the ‘whole package’ as it were. From my understanding it’s simply a harder type of game to develop from a technical side of things to begin with, popular engines people use to great effect for all types of games aren’t quite as ready out the box for RTS. Balancing is way more complicated than it is for many other genres.
It also depends what one wants to do. Or what expectations are. Some compelling twist on the genre, some innovative, killer mode that gets existing genre fans excited, or creates new ones, absolutely it just takes some inspiration, and a small team can conceivably deliver that, and do in many a genre.
If someone wants to make, or potential fans want a Blizz-tier game (not necessarily stylistically), that starts being prohibitively difficult for very small teams, no matter their levels of passion, or how great their ideas. Varied campaigns with great presentation. Engaging core gameplay, vibrant multiplayer, good world building, good voice acting, good music, good artwork and worldbuilding. Different game modes, a fleshed-out feature suite, custom tools. Good technical performance in terms of graphical fidelity versus smoothness and system requirements, solid netcode etc.
Now, the next big step in RTS may not have to be that, ‘whole package’ kinda game. But if you do want that, you’re going to need a budget, unless your small team contains a concentration of genuine polymaths.
As for tools, I’d disagree there. The whole reason there’s such a huge variety and richness of indie games is improved tools. You can have some great ideas, vision and pour your soul into building it without also having to be an engine designer, or how to optimise things at a granular hardware level or whatever.
However, many huge games have at least some kind of budget, some kind of vision and some kind of sensible project management. The latter being a rather underrated facet. Nintendo can reliably put out a handful of absolute bangers every console generation because they’ve got it down to a tee.
Are there many good modern CRPGs on low budgets? Absolutely there’s some quality entries there. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the runaway crossover hit, because Larian had all three of the aforementioned.
Hideo Kojima is about as an idiosyncratic auteur as exists in game development outside of indies, you don’t get as innovative and distinctive a series as MGS without him, but you also don’t get an MGS without Konami giving him money.
I wasn't disagreeing with your premise at all. just felt like going on a ramble
in 2020, a modern AAA game with a release window of maybe 4-5 years would have had a budget of $50-150 million on average, including the cost of both development and marketing. those are the kind of funds you'd need for "the whole package" back when Frost Giant started up - and the cost just shoots up and up for every year that passes by.
by January 2022, Frost Giant had raised $35 million in seed funding and series A investment. they also had a few million from Kickstarter. honestly, impressive fundraising for a start-up company. it was an appropriate level of funding for what their stated goals were. there's a "core values" section that's been up on their website since the day it went live:
"Strategically expand the audience. First appeal to the core audience, then also provide a great experience to strategy gamers at large. Establish a strong main before taking the natural."
it's implicit that the core audience of Blizzard-style RTS are people who play competitive 1v1 and who like to observe competitive 1v1 as an esport.
my expectation was that FG would release a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode before they attempted to branch out into other things: like the mayhem mode, the custom editor, the co-op mode, the campaign, the Blizzard-tier cinematics and all the rest of it. I've ordered those features into a release pipeline that makes the most sense if their core values are to be taken seriously. 1v1 appeals to the core RTS crowd. mayhem mode appeals to the DOTA / RTS crossover crowd, which is enormous. you get those 2 things out the door before you even dream about the other stuff. bit by bit, you expand the game out towards the more pedestrian strategy game enjoyers.
what they've done is the complete opposite of that. instead of establishing a strong main, they've recklessly gone out into the map and taken a nexus first without a wall-off. they've also taken a 3rd hatch before pool, and a cheeky ninja command center way out in the corner of the map, before even making a single army unit. a strong main would have been a finished, well-polished 1v1 mode with all the units available to play. the fact that we don't even have all the units that are planned for 1v1 is proof that FG stretched themselves too thin and bit off way more than they could chew.
I'm sure that a well-polished F2P esport RTS that had galvanized the wc3 / sc2 core would have been enough to secure investment for ambitious expansion. by now, they could have had thousands of people playing those 2 core game modes: 1v1 and Mayhem. in the meantime, they could have been monetizing both of those game modes with cosmetics.
Stormgate is a failure because the development suffers from irresponsible allocations of time, energy and money. you don't need $100 million to make a decent core game mode. someone in the leadership role is running the company with incredibly poor signal-to-noise control. yeah, let's make a Blizz-tier campaign for one of the three races before we've even designed all of the multiplayer units. great idea the company making the next big real time strategy game does not seem to be very good at strategy
See for me the core audience isn't the one you mention. Or not necessarily. There are 3 reasons I see: 1) people like me, playing BW (this extends to sc2, war3, aoe2) will keep playing that game forever at this stage. Even when i played sc2 and was involved in the foreign pro scene for LDLC and MYM i didn't give up on BW. In fact i played a lot of 2v2 and the campaign in sc2 early and disliked the 1v1.
2) i don't think i d want to go hardcore competitive in any game anymore. I m old now, i have a kid, a very demanding job, adulting problems ^^ i d imagine most of the sc/wc people are in that bracket. However i would absolutely settle for some 3v3, 4v4, 50v50 (whatever) mod that i can play casually enough but able to scale to competitive if i want to. Use map setting too. I m also from a generation that has a big distrust of monetization models.
3) i hate the premise of "building for esport". Make a good game, it ll take care of itself. Artificially propping it with money for a bit just kills it sooner rather than later (see overwatch). This ties in with the monetization too.
For me the future of RTS is 2 branches: some more casual games based on multiplayer, maybe cross platform even. Almost Nintendo like to hook a wide audience to the genre.
And then a more advanced type, probably locked to PC for keyboard/mouse but without taking away base building, base layout etc. Again it s personal but one thing i hated about sc2 was you had "too much space" as it were. Take a million expos, building placement doesn't matter much vs the aesthetic of P bases in brood war or the village vibe of bases in wc3/aoe2. I don't want to just mash big armies and go at it (unless you add logistics elements to the game to compensate) as those feel more like mobile games. I d rather play simcity 4000 with a few battles than battle of the Marne WW1 slugfest
I get that he needs to present a positive image but trying to secure additional investment when your 1.0 just complete bombed and your already 35 mil in the hole is like 'good luck with that dude'.
sub 1k peak on the launch weekend is even worse then I expected.
(ps, his talk of needing to partner up is just further proof the money has run out)
On August 13 2025 05:16 Gorsameth wrote: I get that he needs to present a positive image but trying to secure additional investment when your 1.0 just complete bombed and your already 35 mil in the hole is like 'good luck with that dude'.
sub 1k peak on the launch weekend is even worse then I expected.
(ps, his talk of needing to partner up is just further proof the money has run out)
It was worse than I expected, but not to a degree that especially surprised me.
A big problem is that it doesn’t feel like a launch, at all. I remember me and my boys being jelly one of us got into the closed phase, and bugging them for their thoughts. I’ve somehow managed to never get into a Blizz beta despite playing their games since Diablo 1, so I was used to the FOMO!
EA there’s at least some hype as a hook, finally the rest of us can try it. Undercooked as fuck, but at least there’s that ‘first chance for most of us to have a go’ pull.
This ‘launch’ doesn’t really have any hook. Those super excited to try it out for the first time, well they already did that. Those waiting for a vaguely polished, vaguely feature-complete product are still waiting.
They’ve a real Tragedy of the Commons problem now, and it’s very much of their own making. Talking personally, but also off quite a few other anecdotal accounts. It’s sorta approaching a level of decent enough, but people who would play it are holding off until enough other people are playing it, be that friends or just a bigger overall playerbase: It’s like ‘hey yeah my country will take global warming seriously, but only if everyone else does’ in reverse.
I don’t see how Frost Giant fix that problem. They make it worse with every call they make, even if one concedes they perhaps were forced to by other circumstances.
Going into EA release that early, brutalised the hype of the unknown, and they lost a lot of goodwill through other mistakes too.
If you’re coming out of EA, you best have something pretty close to a retail ready release. Which they did not have. You also squander Steam sending a ‘this game has now exited Early Access’ to a shitload of people. A visibility boost you’re never getting again without spending money, or if some big streamers love your game and signal boost it.
To me, there are two types of mistakes in life. The first is X problem is just innately complicated, or there’s a load of unknowns, and even the best experts can get those wrong. The second is things that are so obvious that even the most idiotic layman could tell the experts where they’re fucking up, but they continue regardless.
Frost Giant have made so many errors in the latter category it’s almost unbelievable. If they encounter a hole on their daily walk, it would not surprise me if, instead of just sidestepping it, they triple jumped into the chasm
Also, this line :"When a game underperforms, the detractors come out in force." It does not state that "detractors" are the reason for the failure. It's the opposite that is true. However, even mentioning "detractors" in this kind of post leads to some thoughts. They see "detractors" as the relevant source of problems. The game hasn't suffered from negative review bombing, personal attacks, threats, or negative media campaigns. Everyone was optimistic and supportive. Every failure is the consequence of their actions. They had enough time and money. They received media support from RTS streamers and casters, and positive reviews from gaming websites. It's their lack of management or talent.
I don't know if it's ego or delusion, but they have to stop explaining their mistakes with "detractors". At least at the end.
On August 13 2025 06:27 ChillFlame wrote: This is pretty much game over message. I've seen it a lot. Finding "partners" when everything is in the open is unlikely.
I warned as many people as I could. Bying online only campaign from the studio that might close very soon isn't a good idea.
I could see it being an attractive buy, I think it almost entirely depends on how actually good their tech is, or what their other financial obligations are.
In theory, I mean they’ve got a UE5 ready RTS toolkit, their game isn’t crazy far off 1.0
You could buy them for effectively pennies on the pound, and without much further investment required to finish their particular game, and just license their tech to whoever is looking to make an RTS game, IDK say Games Workshop wants to commission another RTS. And just keep doing that and more than make your money back.
Now as I stressed earlier, it very heavily depends on how good that toolkit is, or indeed how licensing bolt-ons to UE5 would even work legally. And we know it’s not the most performant
But I’ve felt for a while that might be FG’s most lucrative revenue stream potentially. It’s even more attractive if you’re the saviour investor who’s needed to keep the lights on, you can just swoop in and have that with a fraction of the investment FG spent in building those tools.
On August 13 2025 06:45 ChillFlame wrote: Also, this line :"When a game underperforms, the detractors come out in force." It does not state that "detractors" are the reason for the failure. It's the opposite that is true. However, even mentioning "detractors" in this kind of post leads to some thoughts. They see "detractors" as the relevant source of problems. The game hasn't suffered from negative review bombing, personal attacks, threats, or negative media campaigns. Everyone was optimistic and supportive. Every failure is the consequence of their actions. They had enough time and money. They received media support from RTS streamers and casters, and positive reviews from gaming websites. It's their lack of management or talent.
I don't know if it's ego or delusion, but they have to stop explaining their mistakes with "detractors". At least at the end.
Remember Tim was caught positive review bombing the game. He absolutely is the person who thinks he deserves success and that SG would be #1 is not for 'the haters'.
Edit: No one is coming to be the saviour and keep the lights on, the game is dead and buried. At best someone will come in and buy the engine from its carcass.
On August 13 2025 06:27 ChillFlame wrote: This is pretty much game over message. I've seen it a lot. Finding "partners" when everything is in the open is unlikely.
I warned as many people as I could. Bying online only campaign from the studio that might close very soon isn't a good idea.
I could see it being an attractive buy, I think it almost entirely depends on how actually good their tech is, or what their other financial obligations are.
In theory, I mean they’ve got a UE5 ready RTS toolkit, their game isn’t crazy far off 1.0
You could buy them for effectively pennies on the pound, and without much further investment required to finish their particular game, and just license their tech to whoever is looking to make an RTS game, IDK say Games Workshop wants to commission another RTS. And just keep doing that and more than make your money back.
Now as I stressed earlier, it very heavily depends on how good that toolkit is, or indeed how licensing bolt-ons to UE5 would even work legally. And we know it’s not the most performant
But I’ve felt for a while that might be FG’s most lucrative revenue stream potentially. It’s even more attractive if you’re the saviour investor who’s needed to keep the lights on, you can just swoop in and have that with a fraction of the investment FG spent in building those tools.
I lack the expertise to get into the nuances of financing. I basically don't know what happens if someone wants to buy their tech for a penny. Do they wait till bankruptcy sell out? How do they split it with other investors like Kakao Games?
I'm not a software engineer either. How valuable is their tech? I have no idea. I heard Snowplay is a heavily specified piece of tech tied heavily to UE 5 and other services I don't remember =) There might be problems with licensing, as you mentioned. I'm pretty sure there are problems with tools and documentation, too.
On August 13 2025 06:27 ChillFlame wrote: This is pretty much game over message. I've seen it a lot. Finding "partners" when everything is in the open is unlikely.
I warned as many people as I could. Bying online only campaign from the studio that might close very soon isn't a good idea.
I could see it being an attractive buy, I think it almost entirely depends on how actually good their tech is, or what their other financial obligations are.
In theory, I mean they’ve got a UE5 ready RTS toolkit, their game isn’t crazy far off 1.0
You could buy them for effectively pennies on the pound, and without much further investment required to finish their particular game, and just license their tech to whoever is looking to make an RTS game, IDK say Games Workshop wants to commission another RTS. And just keep doing that and more than make your money back.
Now as I stressed earlier, it very heavily depends on how good that toolkit is, or indeed how licensing bolt-ons to UE5 would even work legally. And we know it’s not the most performant
But I’ve felt for a while that might be FG’s most lucrative revenue stream potentially. It’s even more attractive if you’re the saviour investor who’s needed to keep the lights on, you can just swoop in and have that with a fraction of the investment FG spent in building those tools.
EPT
.. has release a game every 2 years for the past 6 years that were all great.
the company making the next big real time strategy game does not seem to be very good at strategy
