Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 266

On September 15 2025 06:02 CicadaSC wrote:

IGN is inclined to not burn bridges, i.e., at least review games decently so they continue getting early access reviews of games.

On September 15 2025 08:52 WombaT wrote:

They’re as general a gaming review spot as there is. Most reviews are pretty OK through that lens.

8/10 for Stormgate is a bit silly, but if you’ve never played much RTS at all it’s probably a good bit better than someone who’s played nothing but RTS for 20 years will tell you

I was disheartened to see a negative headline from my previous posts. Even though I've made an effort to explicitly accept responsibility, Windows Central said: "Starcraft successor Stormgate is a flop; creator blames gamers". That was definitely not my intention, but I'm reminded that sometimes good intentions are still perceived negatively. I'll touch on this again, but I want to start by taking a step back.

Great games often take time. StarCraft II had over 7 years before Wings of Liberty. Some of the best games from the past year had long dev cycles, including Black Myth: Wukong, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Hollow Knight: Silk Song. It's hard to precisely plan for how long it will take to "find the fun" or to achieve the level of polish that produces greatness. I've wished for more time on every game I've ever worked on, even though some have turned out well.

There have been many valid specific criticisms of Stormgate's Early Access, but the bottom line is that the release was undercooked. Before this gets construed as deflecting, the reasons are my responsibility: scope, which I covered last week; velocity, in that progress didn't happen quickly enough, particularly for the campaign; and finally, funding, in that I failed to raise enough capital to provide the team more time.

Frost Giant had a successful crowdfunding campaign, but the Kickstarter was for new additions: a physical collector's box and broader access to the closed beta. These added costs: physical goods and network infrastructure. The Kickstarter was oversubscribed and did supplement the budget, but factoring in the new costs, the addition was modest.

Unfortunately, the Kickstarter also generated negative sentiment. This first stemmed from a disconnect about what constitutes "launch". The team thinks of "launch" as the moment that anyone in the world can buy and play the game, and 24/7 live service begins. Some others think of "launch" as the moment a game exits Early Access. Both definitions are understandable, but when the description referenced being "funded to launch", it created controversy. As soon as that disconnect was evident, we issued a statement, but the harm was done.

The second incident was the result of fixing an error. The Stormgate Kickstarter was consistent in multiple places about the contents of the offering, with one exception: a FAQ made an inconsistent and erroneously broad statement. When the team member who wrote that section found out, they corrected the error without posting an explanation. This is bad practice reflecting inexperience, and once again, harm was done.

Between the undercooked build, the ambitious surface area, and Kickstarter communication mishaps, Stormgate's Early Access landed poorly. In the year that followed, much effort went into trying to recover, but the negative outcome persisted. Next week, I'll make an effort to tie these reflections together into conclusions that I hope might benefit others.

On September 16 2025 07:31 CicadaSC wrote:
I would love a post mortem interview with the devs when they don't have to worry about PR for the company/game anymore once all is said and done. What is monks opinion, what went wrong? What does everyone else think from inside the company? I'm really curious. Hopefully someone can put together these interviews.

On September 16 2025 08:21 Gescom wrote:
Edit: Maybe Tim is expending all his personal money and paying out of pocket or something completely foolish to run skeleton crew right now but to me it's been obvious, despite all the horseshit rhetoric from Tim, that they fired all of the staff the day after the game launched and it was never a "wait and see, maybe we find a partnership" situation. They never issued a single change to the game after the 1.0.0.

I'm very committed to trying to find a path forward for the company and for players, but I don't have a concrete answer right now. Partnership conversations take time, and the outcome will remain uncertain until the process concludes. I remain hopeful about the conversations taking place.

On September 16 2025 15:24 Jeremy Reimer wrote:


There's zero chance that Tim is paying salaries out of his own pocket. It's quite possible that they had enough money left over to pay salaries for August and September, but the staff isn't doing any actual work because they are waiting for news from Tim that there will actually be a company after September is up.

Tim, for his part, continues to claim that he's working on saving the company. On his LinkedIn post from today, he replied to a commentator who wanted to know what was happening:



But it's been three weeks since he said that he'd have a "meaningful update in the coming weeks". And the update is the same as it was back then.

Exactly how long he can continue to string this along remains unclear.