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On September 13 2025 13:44 Bacillus wrote:Show nested quote +On September 13 2025 05:21 Jeremy Reimer wrote:On September 13 2025 05:15 _Spartak_ wrote: lol It was hilarious that voidlegacy turned out to be Tim Morten though. That will never stop being funny. Did this actually get confirmed somehow? I'm a bit out of the loop on the reddit wars.
yeah, voidlegacy is Tim Morten's sock puppet. he hasn't admitted to astroturfing on reddit, but it's obvious once you examine the account
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On September 13 2025 16:18 ChillFlame wrote:Show nested quote +On September 13 2025 12:53 SoleSteeler wrote: When that happens, usually the other person has been waiting 2+ minutes. I've been on both sides of that - instant queues, or waiting 3+ minutes to get someone 500 MMR below me. Hey, usually it works like this: The game has 4 people in the queue: 800, 900, 1200, 1800 MMR. It can immediately pair 800 MMR guy with 900, 1200 with 1800. But it doesn't. It waits for a minute to increase the accuracy of matchmaking. After a minute 1300 and 2000 MMR guys join the queue. 800 gets paired with 900, 1200 with 1300, 1800 with 2000. All the above is quite irrelevant for SG. You can't make a properly working matchmaking for a game with 30-100 CCU. Only half of them aren't AFK, half of that number is playing 1v1, 1/5 of this number is not already in the game. So there are 1.5 to 5 people in the queue if we're being optimistic.
Yes, usually it works like that. The population is too low - so they've significantly relaxed the boundaries. Otherwise some people would never get games.
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On September 13 2025 13:44 Bacillus wrote:Show nested quote +On September 13 2025 05:21 Jeremy Reimer wrote:On September 13 2025 05:15 _Spartak_ wrote: lol It was hilarious that voidlegacy turned out to be Tim Morten though. That will never stop being funny. Did this actually get confirmed somehow? I'm a bit out of the loop on the reddit wars. Never 100% confirmed but does seem to be likely/plausible
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It's so dumb and immature if he's really been spending his time arguing with people like this... (and I feel it's 99.9% certain it was him). Not that it really matters in the end. If the game was really fun to most people, no one would care who he argues with.
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On September 14 2025 02:09 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On September 13 2025 13:44 Bacillus wrote:On September 13 2025 05:21 Jeremy Reimer wrote:On September 13 2025 05:15 _Spartak_ wrote: lol It was hilarious that voidlegacy turned out to be Tim Morten though. That will never stop being funny. Did this actually get confirmed somehow? I'm a bit out of the loop on the reddit wars. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1n6pqy9/tim_in_the_trenches_again/ second reply and its comments
The real clincher was when someone uncovered a voidlegacy post that was a month before Tim Morten went to India to give a talk to some students. Hilariously, this talk was about a month before Stormgate's disastrous launch, so it was a weird time for Tim to be traveling halfway around the world to give advice to young game developers. But Tim never passes up a chance to fly around the world to talk about himself!
Anyway, in this post, voidlegacy not only listed the exact same games (and I think their review scores as well) that were in Tim's speech, but they were also in the same order. You'd pretty much have to have been practicing by going over and over the same speech in order to hit that combination.
EDIT: Also, voidlegacy "estimated" the number of monthly Stormgate players for August 2024 (the Early Access launch month) as 300,000 before Tim Morten announced that it was actually 300,000.
I've been trying to find the exact post where the India game talk thing was pointed out, but Google isn't helping. It's also more difficult because the moderators of /r/stormgate had a period where they would delete any posts where someone mentioned that voidlegacy was actually Tim Morten. Which was... a choice, certainly. Do you remember any of that, Spartak?
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I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up.
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On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up. they are talking to investors right now and the ceo sacced his salary. I think there is an argument for more funding as once there was hype around stormgate even though now there is not. its not like nobody was ever excited for a potential big new rts.
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United Kingdom20323 Posts
On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up.
If they take the servers down with the current game build then singleplayer becomes inaccessible and they have refund fiasco with steam. They might be trying to avoid that.
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On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up. also the CEO said he believes in the Stop Killing Games movement so that may play a part of it.
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SKG is directly against his buisness model. I'm sure he hates it.
1. Make a shitty live service game 2. Scam gamers into buying it via marketing. 3. Close the game before the enf of a year without being accountable for a minute. 4. Repeat.
He tried to make SC2 into a shitty live service game. The same with C&C. The same with SG. Failed every time. Tim is one of the reasons why SKG exists.
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On September 14 2025 08:57 CicadaSC wrote:Show nested quote +On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up. they are talking to investors right now and the ceo sacced his salary. I think there is an argument for more funding as once there was hype around stormgate even though now there is not. its not like nobody was ever excited for a potential big new rts.
I think most of us would've liked Stormgate to succeed, even just as a decent new RTS that heavily borrows from established predecessors, but it looks like they just couldn't get their priorities straight. Classic over-promised, under-delivered scenario and at this point people are just kind-of out of fucks to give about the game, which is understandable.
Frustration is the discrepancy between expectations and reality, after all and now that people thought they were getting an on-par experience alike to SC2 and WC3 Frost Giant is reaping what they've sowed.
Not sure if they'll be able to redeem the project like Hello Games did with No Man's Sky, but I personally doubt it.
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On September 14 2025 17:51 Creager wrote: Not sure if they'll be able to redeem the project like Hello Games did with No Man's Sky, but I personally doubt it.
It's incomparable. NMS had a big publisher and insane sales, despite being terrible on launch. Also, NMS was B2P, so it didn't have to rely on CCU. They already sold 1m+ copies on PS only. So basically, they had nearly infinite resources to fix the game.
On the other hand, SG is F2P, so they must rely on MTX sales. And it isn't going well. They have ~100 CCU, and they lose ~$15m per year https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1ke6nob/disappointing_results_from_frost_giant_2024/
So please, stop bringing NMS or CP2077. These are B2P games with huge initial sales. If you have an example for a $40m+ F2P game that came back from ~100 CCU, I'd be glad to hear.
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additionally they had the will to change and do better, which imo is just as important as having the finances, "we screwed up and we will do everything in our power to make it right".
We're not going to hear that coming out of FG.
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On September 14 2025 18:02 ChillFlame wrote:Show nested quote +On September 14 2025 17:51 Creager wrote: Not sure if they'll be able to redeem the project like Hello Games did with No Man's Sky, but I personally doubt it. It's incomparable. NMS had a big publisher and insane sales, despite being terrible on launch. Also, NMS was B2P, so it didn't have to rely on CCU. They already sold 1m+ copies on PS only. So basically, they had nearly infinite resources to fix the game. On the other hand, SG is F2P, so they must rely on MTX sales. And it isn't going well. They have ~100 CCU, and they lose ~$15m per year https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1ke6nob/disappointing_results_from_frost_giant_2024/So please, stop bringing NMS or CP2077. These are B2P games with huge initial sales. If you have an example for a $40m+ F2P game that came back from ~100 CCU, I'd be glad to hear.
I was specifically replying to Cicada's comment regarding the possibility of additional funding, which then would be at least temporarily decoupled from CCUs and MTX sales and would allow them to stay afloat a little longer while trying to improve the game.
It was not really my intention to bring it up as a financial comparison, but as an general example of the process of attempting to fix/improve a game after releasing it in a lackluster state, as unfortunately this has become an established business practice by now, but good point.
Also to be completely fair here, FG sold Stormgate for a month or so after initially releasing it to early access, so if they had made a different impression with their customer base back then they could've hypothetically generated some additional revenue, but the product not being good enough seemed to have forced them into going full F2P much earlier than they would've liked to.
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On September 14 2025 18:24 Gorsameth wrote: additionally they had the will to change and do better, which imo is just as important as having the finances, "we screwed up and we will do everything in our power to make it right".
We're not going to hear that coming out of FG.
Also good point, just because you have the means to doesn't necessarily translate to you going the extra mile to spend that money on fixing shit.
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On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up.
Stormgate uses a pair of third-party services (Hathora to provision the servers, Pragma to handle all the back-end game server logic, like user logins, account handling, matchmaking, leaderboards, etc).
It's likely that Frost Giant prepaid for some months ahead, but even if they didn't, the cost to rent these services would be about $1k to $2k per month, possibly less (I'm just going by what's on their website). In any case it's far less than the salaries they are continuing to pay their staff (although it's unclear how many people still remain at the company, given that both art directors and the sound director have "looking for work" in their LinkedIn profiles now)
Ironically, if the company had written their own server code, it would have been a lot cheaper to operate for low volumes of players in the long term. On the order of $100 to $200 per month or so. One of the engineers of the original Sins of a Solar Empire did that, out of his own pocket, even after the original company dissolved. But he had written all the server code himself, and it ran on a single machine. It turned out to be a good idea, because Sins 2 sold really well, and nobody had any bad feelings about the original.
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On September 15 2025 03:02 Jeremy Reimer wrote:Show nested quote +On September 14 2025 08:17 gobbledydook wrote: I’m surprised with 50 concurrent players the servers haven’t been shut down yet. I wonder where the money is coming from to keep the servers up. Stormgate uses a pair of third-party services (Hathora to provision the servers, Pragma to handle all the back-end game server logic, like user logins, account handling, matchmaking, leaderboards, etc). It's likely that Frost Giant prepaid for some months ahead, but even if they didn't, the cost to rent these services would be about $1k to $2k per month, possibly less (I'm just going by what's on their website). In any case it's far less than the salaries they are continuing to pay their staff (although it's unclear how many people still remain at the company, given that both art directors and the sound director have "looking for work" in their LinkedIn profiles now) Ironically, if the company had written their own server code, it would have been a lot cheaper to operate for low volumes of players in the long term. On the order of $100 to $200 per month or so. One of the engineers of the original Sins of a Solar Empire did that, out of his own pocket, even after the original company dissolved. But he had written all the server code himself, and it ran on a single machine. It turned out to be a good idea, because Sins 2 sold really well, and nobody had any bad feelings about the original.
It's similar with Guild Wars 1. ArenaNet said that running this game is so cheap that they can basically keep it up indefinitely so don't plan on ever closing it. It's now run by 1 or 2 devs who do some occasional bug fixing and support for it while most of their resources are directed towards running and expanding Guild Wars 2 and maybe GW3 at some point.
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The market is just too unpredictable these days. IGN rated this an 8/10 game. IGN rated Concorde a 7/10 game. OTOH, Black Myth Wukong also got an 8/10. Clearly, IGN are experts because they have a really slick looking web site and do a great job with very insightful reporting.
You just never know these days.. its an unpredictable world of total chaos and uncertainty!
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On September 15 2025 04:55 JimmyJRaynor wrote: The market is just too unpredictable these days. IGN rated this an 8/10 game. IGN rated Concorde a 7/10 game. OTOH, Black Myth Wukong also got an 8/10. Clearly, IGN are experts because they have a really slick looking web site and do a great job with very insightful reporting.
You just never know these days.. its an unpredictable world of total chaos and uncertainty! Yeah, we live in a crazy world where every game gets 8/10, but some of them suck for some reason.
Steam rating exists, and it's pretty accurate. I play hundreds of games, and check the rating for most of them. I feel like user rating is off in ~15% of the cases.
Game journalists just give every game 8/10. Who would ever listen to these clowns?
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