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On August 22 2025 03:36 Uldridge wrote:
The people making stormgate are trying to reinvent the newspaper. However, now you've got brainworm zombie algorithm doomscroll apps like tiktok, so you just put yourself in a losing (lost) position. Forced mate in 3.
I see what you're saying, but I don't really agree. The RTS community is still large enough and hungry enough for a new title. This is bolstered by the fact that new RTS games continue to get made (Dawn of War 4 just got announced this week!)
But if you want to make a new RTS, you should really watch this talk by Bruce Shelley (lead of Age of Empires) from thirteen years ago.
He laid it all out in a slide at 11:54:
Derivative games fail when they are:
* Not a sufficiently new experience
* Do not reach/surpass the bar already set for gameplay, technology, look & feel
* Developer ego too arrogant
Frost Giant made every single one of these mistakes, and added a few of their own.
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Derivative games fail when they are:
* Not a sufficiently new experience
* Do not reach/surpass the bar already set for gameplay, technology, look & feel
* Developer ego too arrogant
Yeah, that's 100% true.
Points 1 and 2 are extremely important for RTS.
While FIFA fans may buy a new game every year, RTS fans still play 20y old SCBW and WC3. You need not only to be better than these games, but be substantially better, because people would not drop the game they spent 5k hours on because there's another game that is marginally better.
All these talks about people wanting another SC2 but with active development are bullshit.
Point 3 is irrelevant if the devs are competent. If you're Chris Wilson and players are not happy with PoE direction, you just explain why you're right, and players are wrong in 3k symbol post on Reddit. And everyone just has to deal with it, because his ego is matched by his skill. PoE1 still has an 88% Steam rating and 200k concurrent players at the new league launch.
This is obviously not the case with FG. I think I've never seen a dev so arrogant and incompetent. Even Peter Molyneux delivered good games despite his bullshit and bragging.
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On August 22 2025 02:00 SoleSteeler wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2025 00:45 goody153 wrote:
Downloaded Stormgate. Any like description on the races ? Like comparison to like wc3, bw and sc2 races in a sense ? Vanguard is a mix of SC2 terran and War3 human. lancer = footman exo = rifleman (also sort of marine) medtech = priest/medic hedgehog = cyclone/vulture (no mines) atlas = siege tank (my favourite unit) etc. They all feel a little different than their counterparts, but their roles are similar. Infernal is like a mix of undead, orc and zerg Celestial is pretty unique, but most similar to protoss and NE (after this patch, with moving their town hall around a lot). Play a few games of each and you'll see. For celestial, you have to build using the "Q" build button.
I see I see. Thank you !
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I have an idea for the Golden Armada Celestials in stormgate. It's a Tier 3 defensive tech upgrade, kind of like Planetary Fortress but we will call it the GOLDEN DOME. It doesn't fire but it blocks a lot of damage, so the Celestial will still have to react to it because it will not fend off forces on its own but it can provide some extra time. Inspired by real life. Thoughts?
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An update from Tim Morten from Gamescom:
Gamescom was excruciating this year - due to the two kidney stones who decided to ambush me in the middle of the final night. Sincere thanks to the German doctors who helped stave off the pain!
Before my hospital visit, I had some encouraging conversations with potential partners for Frost Giant. I'm cautiously optimistic, but partnership conversations will take time to play out.
There's an audience who clearly enjoy Stormgate, even if not currently enough to support our company. The development team cares deeply about Stormgate and its community, and I intend to do everything I can to find the best path forward.
For the sake of players, and the team, I'm hoping to have a meaningful update in the weeks ahead. I'd ask for patience in the meantime -- we all want to resolve uncertainty, but that will take time. My deepest gratitude to those who have expressed support throughout.
"Encouraging conversations with potential partners" could mean anything. They could just be people who are being nice to Tim without any plans to do anything, or he could be deep in talks with some other company about a buyout. I would guess probably the former, but we'll just have to wait and see.
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On August 25 2025 07:44 Jeremy Reimer wrote:An update from Tim Morten from Gamescom: Show nested quote +Gamescom was excruciating this year - due to the two kidney stones who decided to ambush me in the middle of the final night. Sincere thanks to the German doctors who helped stave off the pain!
Before my hospital visit, I had some encouraging conversations with potential partners for Frost Giant. I'm cautiously optimistic, but partnership conversations will take time to play out.
There's an audience who clearly enjoy Stormgate, even if not currently enough to support our company. The development team cares deeply about Stormgate and its community, and I intend to do everything I can to find the best path forward.
For the sake of players, and the team, I'm hoping to have a meaningful update in the weeks ahead. I'd ask for patience in the meantime -- we all want to resolve uncertainty, but that will take time. My deepest gratitude to those who have expressed support throughout. "Encouraging conversations with potential partners" could mean anything. They could just be people who are being nice to Tim without any plans to do anything, or he could be deep in talks with some other company about a buyout. I would guess probably the former, but we'll just have to wait and see.
There's nothing substantial, yes. Also, it can't possibly be.
In 2 weeks, the weekly player count peak will be 150. There's nothing in this world that could bring players back. Not even a miracle. (Maybe some bullshit move like a massive viral marketing campaign + bot attack could work, but no one will invest resources in this).
The last chance was at the launch (not really, if you followed the game closely).
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On August 25 2025 08:09 ChillFlame wrote:
There's nothing substantial, yes. Also, it can't possibly be.
In 2 weeks, the weekly player count peak will be 150. There's nothing in this world that could bring players back. Not even a miracle. (Maybe some bullshit move like a massive viral marketing campaign + bot attack could work, but no one will invest resources in this).
The last chance was at the launch (not really, if you followed the game closely).
Yeah, the graphs for both EA and full Steam launch kind of tell the whole story. This is the graph for the EA launch:
And this is the one for the Steam launch:
If you superimpose them, you can see that they're basically the same graph:
Only... the "full" launch is one-fifth the size of the EA launch, peaking at just under 1000 CCU instead of 5000 CCU.
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Gamescom isn't a place to sign deals but at least he thinks he got some interest.
definitely unlikely he would get anything significant enough to continue developing.
Coop needs a fair bit of work, campaign is expensive.
He can paint his side of story to the interested parties but even the recent reviews didn't get better. That really says it all.
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Northern Ireland26794 Posts
If Tim Morten manages to get substantial investment in this phase, hats off. I might hire him to manage my Tinder profile
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On August 25 2025 08:27 Jeremy Reimer wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2025 08:09 ChillFlame wrote:
There's nothing substantial, yes. Also, it can't possibly be.
In 2 weeks, the weekly player count peak will be 150. There's nothing in this world that could bring players back. Not even a miracle. (Maybe some bullshit move like a massive viral marketing campaign + bot attack could work, but no one will invest resources in this).
The last chance was at the launch (not really, if you followed the game closely).
Yeah, the graphs for both EA and full Steam launch kind of tell the whole story. This is the graph for the EA launch:
There's A LOT to unpack there.
1. Initial hype was massive. Was it 300k or 500k of wishlists? Every RTS streamer hyped up this game. General sentiment was insanely positive.
2. Paid EA had ¬300 players more than the F2P one.
Paid one included KS backers, Steam early-early access buyers, and beta testers.
Free one included obviously everyone.
This was a very obvious signal that the general public had no interest whatsoever. How is this even possible?
3. Release. Every person who had the game wishlisted got a Steam notification. Some of my friends who never wishlisted it also got a notification. There were also SG+AoE4 bundles that were advertised by Steam.
Still, no one came to check. Not even 26k of KS backers.
They tried everything. "From the developers of SC2" marketing vector. Constant mentions of AAA quality and SC3 https://imgur.com/a/EirxknF. There were 10+ promoted streams at the EA launch, including Asmongold). Even some weird stuff like Nerdlayer's "Death of SC2" video with SG promotion coming out of the blue.
Still, no one came to check the game. It's terminally uninteresting.
The more they showed the game, the fewer people were interested. Even if the quality became better.
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Ah, I might have an explanation other than the game being uninteresting.
I think their whole marketing strategy was to use their reputation to sell "the dream of the next big RTS". Not the "next big RTS", the dream specifically. They advertised their "innovative engine", social elements, proper mod support, and innovative game modes like 3v3 PvPvE. These things sound like they belong to the next-gen RTS. The other info was very limited. They thought people would fill the gaps themselves and imagine the best RTS ever. And it worked.
The more they showed the game, the more people understood that SG is too different from their dreams. There's not a single next-gen element in this game. Everything is just bland and derivative. So people just got disappointed and moved on.
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On August 25 2025 10:10 ChillFlame wrote:
The more they showed the game, the more people understood that SG is too different from their dreams. There's not a single next-gen element in this game. Everything is just bland and derivative. So people just got disappointed and moved on.
Yeah, I think this was the real problem.
What does a "next-gen RTS" even mean? Nobody knows, but everybody can imagine something that it might mean. Maybe it's thousands of units at once? Totally crazy battles with ten different effects going at once? Zooming into each unit and watching them die in slow motion? Explosions that deform the terrain? Anything you can imagine could be really cool in your head.
But when Stormgate launched in Early Access, everybody could see that there was nothing remotely "next-gen" about any of it. Oh, they bumped the unit count to 300/300, yay. But then you look closer, and each unit takes more supply than in Starcraft. So, no. And the graphics looked worse than Starcraft II, a game nearly fifteen years old at that point.
So, maybe the story and world-building might be cool? Well... no. It was a bland mashup of Starcraft and Warcraft tropes with terrible, terrible dialogue and goofy cut-scenes.
So the RTS world simply moved on. Maybe some day someone will actually come up with a "next-gen" RTS. Honestly, some of the huge battles in Beyond All Reason are the closest anyone's come so far.
1. Initial hype was massive. Was it 300k or 500k of wishlists?
It was 500k wishlists, at least according to Frost Giant. Crazy when you think about it now.
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What does a "next-gen RTS" even mean? Nobody knows, but everybody can imagine something that it might mean. Maybe it's thousands of units at once? Totally crazy battles with ten different effects going at once? Zooming into each unit and watching them die in slow motion? Explosions that deform the terrain? Anything you can imagine could be really cool in your head.
When I was posting feedback during the 2nd or the 3rd closed beta phase, everyone was super enthusiastic. You could catch a glimpse of other people's dreams during the brief discussions. Everyone was trying to help build the best RTS, the RTS of their dreams. That was very inspiring.
And then they just dumped a terrible campaign into production without any testing and discussion. They even paid streamers to play it. It was clear that the whole "listening to the community" part was just a marketing strategy. It felt terrible, not gonna lie.
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For a while I had been thinking the numbers just looks weird.
It made top KS page which is great, with momentum that's totally doable.
apparently 25k concurrent player at peak in open beta, even though just 5k concurrent on steam.
So where have all those non steam players went?
Their main channel YouTube videos don't seem falling off in view numbers, still hitting 100-200k for bigger videos
None of stormgate competitive videos are doing great but on a normal player pov videos, it's even worse.
theres already a few the scouring player's (non esports pro or big influencers like winter or lowko) pov videos hitting couple of hundreds and thousands view in a few days/week.
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On August 25 2025 11:44 ETisME wrote:
It made top KS page which is great, with momentum that's totally doable.
apparently 25k concurrent player at peak in open beta, even though just 5k concurrent on steam.
So where have all those non steam players went?
Could you elaborate please? What do you mean by "non-Steam players"
I wasn't part of the alpha, but I'm pretty sure Steam was the only option since beta, including the both open betas.
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On August 25 2025 12:00 ChillFlame wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2025 11:44 ETisME wrote:
It made top KS page which is great, with momentum that's totally doable.
apparently 25k concurrent player at peak in open beta, even though just 5k concurrent on steam.
So where have all those non steam players went?
Could you elaborate please? What do you mean by "non-Steam players" I wasn't part of the alpha, but I'm pretty sure Steam was the only option since beta, including the both open betas.
I think there were another client they ran alongside the steam.
Not a backer so I didn't use the other client
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On August 25 2025 11:44 ETisME wrote:
For a while I had been thinking the numbers just looks weird.
It made top KS page which is great, with momentum that's totally doable.
apparently 25k concurrent player at peak in open beta, even though just 5k concurrent on steam.
So where have all those non steam players went?
As far as I know, Stormgate has only ever been available on Steam. There is no non-Steam launcher, so I'm not sure where you are getting the 25k CCU open beta number from.
Their main channel YouTube videos don't seem falling off in view numbers, still hitting 100-200k for bigger videos
Which main channel YouTube videos are you referring to? Frost Giant's own YouTube channel gets from 3K to 12K views on average. The launch trailer got 33K views.
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As far as I know, Stormgate has only ever been available on Steam. There is no non-Steam launcher, so I'm not sure where you are getting the 25k CCU open beta number from.
Yeah, that got me confused too.
There were 2 versions of the client, but they were both on Steam. The second one was Stormgate PTR or something like that. But I am not 100% sure on this one, so take it with a grain of salt.
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I am plenty sure there's another beta client. It could be the closed beta client
25k was a number referenced in discord a lot, either that is the total player or peak concurrent number of the open beta , I can't be sure.
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On August 25 2025 13:01 ETisME wrote:
I am plenty sure there's another beta client. It could be the closed beta client
25k was a number referenced in discord a lot, either that is the total player or peak concurrent number of the open beta , I can't be sure.
As I said, I'm from one of the earliest closed betas, and both clients were Steam only.
If you have any links to the 25000 player count, it would be helpful.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/G0TfRiG.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/j2Jmxz0.png)
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