On October 09 2025 09:55 Gescom wrote: People so fed up by now with the disingenuousness that Tim getting bodied on his LinkedIn safespace is hilarious.
>This guy could run over a pedestrian texting and driving and blame the changing traffic patterns and competing messaging apps
It just blows my mind that this guy was a CEO and getting paid 250k a year plus 18% of the company stock, and he chose to spend his time arguing with nerds on Reddit. Like, a lot.
Now his company has collapsed and he's spending his time arguing with nerds on LinkedIn.
It's like, dude, the rest of us have nothing better to do so we waste time arguing on the Internet. You had the chance of a lifetime to resurrect RTS gaming but you didn't even care enough to close the Chrome tab and get down to work.
Saw this reddit post stating Tim posted on Linkedin about needing to make a new game, budget $3-$5 million.
In 2019, when I left Blizzard and started pitching Frost Giant, there were about 8000 games released on Steam. In 2024, when Stormgate launched into Early Access, there were over 18000 games released on Steam (source: SteamDB). In late 2019, the Fed's interest rate target range was 1.5% to 1.75%. Today, the Fed's interest rate target range is 4% to 4.25%, after recent cuts.
The market is more than twice as crowded. Capital is more than twice as expensive. Glen Schofield recently observed that target game budgets for new titles have dropped to the $3M to $5M range, which is a fraction of target budgets five years ago.
From a practical perspective, Frost Giant will need to adapt to the current market. To survive, Frost Giant needs to start a new game, and this game will have to be built on a fraction of the budget. Starting a new game should also enable continued improvements to Stormgate.
Who would provide funding given the track record, and if you can't make something with $35 million is it realistic to expect a successful game with a fraction that budget?
A smart thing to do if they get a little money would be to use the existing assets to build some gacha mobile game. Everyone always said the game looks like for mobile anyway, so they have a good market fit at least Would not be surprised if a low effort spinoff like idle city builder or similar makes more MTX$ than SG itself.
On October 09 2025 20:08 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Saw this reddit post stating Tim posted on Linkedin about needing to make a new game, budget $3-$5 million.
In 2019, when I left Blizzard and started pitching Frost Giant, there were about 8000 games released on Steam. In 2024, when Stormgate launched into Early Access, there were over 18000 games released on Steam (source: SteamDB). In late 2019, the Fed's interest rate target range was 1.5% to 1.75%. Today, the Fed's interest rate target range is 4% to 4.25%, after recent cuts.
The market is more than twice as crowded. Capital is more than twice as expensive. Glen Schofield recently observed that target game budgets for new titles have dropped to the $3M to $5M range, which is a fraction of target budgets five years ago.
From a practical perspective, Frost Giant will need to adapt to the current market. To survive, Frost Giant needs to start a new game, and this game will have to be built on a fraction of the budget. Starting a new game should also enable continued improvements to Stormgate.
Who would provide funding given the track record, and if you can't make something with $35 million is it realistic to expect a successful game with a fraction that budget?
$3M easily buys Tim and two friends another 5 year pass to dick around at 200k USD per year to cruise into retirement. Tim is a con artist.
On October 09 2025 20:08 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Saw this reddit post stating Tim posted on Linkedin about needing to make a new game, budget $3-$5 million.
In 2019, when I left Blizzard and started pitching Frost Giant, there were about 8000 games released on Steam. In 2024, when Stormgate launched into Early Access, there were over 18000 games released on Steam (source: SteamDB). In late 2019, the Fed's interest rate target range was 1.5% to 1.75%. Today, the Fed's interest rate target range is 4% to 4.25%, after recent cuts.
The market is more than twice as crowded. Capital is more than twice as expensive. Glen Schofield recently observed that target game budgets for new titles have dropped to the $3M to $5M range, which is a fraction of target budgets five years ago.
From a practical perspective, Frost Giant will need to adapt to the current market. To survive, Frost Giant needs to start a new game, and this game will have to be built on a fraction of the budget. Starting a new game should also enable continued improvements to Stormgate.
Who would provide funding given the track record, and if you can't make something with $35 million is it realistic to expect a successful game with a fraction that budget?
$3M easily buys Tim and two friends another 5 year pass to dick around at 200k USD per year to cruise into retirement. Tim is a con artist.
Wild guess suggest maybe now they are just part of some random money laundering scheme. Just kidding.
On October 09 2025 22:23 Spirral wrote: A smart thing to do if they get a little money would be to use the existing assets to build some gacha mobile game. Everyone always said the game looks like for mobile anyway, so they have a good market fit at least Would not be surprised if a low effort spinoff like idle city builder or similar makes more MTX$ than SG itself.
It makes sense, but Tim has already ruled out making a mobile game:
On October 07 2025 16:29 Bacillus wrote: Has there been any number on how many CCU they roughly needed to make the game viable? Looking at the numbers now, I don't think even a moderate success would have been sufficient to keep 40 person studio afloat in California over extended period of time.
Obviously the whole monetization thing is way more complex than the CCU, but it's at least some number we have pretty reliable access.
50% of sc2 wol users. No i am serious. By their own filings they thought 50% of sc2 was a reasonable expectation.
I forget about that. You have to be completely delusional to think you can get half the amount of active users of the most anticipated rts release to date.
I am still not sure if they believed in 50% WoL users or if it was just a trick to deceive investors.
1. 50% of the WoL playerbase 2. WoL is our prior product 3. $150m self-evaluation
All of this stuff was before the Start Engine campaign if I remember it correctly. Also, tricking people into investing with SE was less important than deceiving big investors like RIOT or Kakao Games, IMO, but these things work for both.
I've read multiple times when this came up that people will write just whatever into these documents in order to arrive at some completely bonkers valuation. Tho in this particular case I wouldn't be surprised if they also actually believed it.
some interesting back-and-forth between Morten and critics posted on reddit.
Tim Morten is not a game maker. He is more of an administrator... a bureaucrat... a financial guy.. than a game maker. Game Makers ... make games.
guys like Robert Decrescenzo, William Pellen, and Ari Gibson are game makers. The guys who founded Activision are game makers. The small group that made Warcraft 1 and 2 and Starcraft 1 are game makers.
It is pretty hilarious watching all these ex-Blizzard guys get steam rolled without ruthless mofo Uncle Bobby K there to keep these "visionaries" on track to making a working, profitable product.
Perhaps Morhaime and Morten can merge their games and studios together. M&M! Their new game can be... Wild-Storm-Gate by Frost-Haven-Giant-Dreams Studios.
Bellular does a good job of covering the main parts of the story, and the controversies (Kickstarter promises, "funded to release", etc) but he misses the larger point about why Stormgate failed.
It wasn't just because the game was "undercooked" and it wasn't because it was much harder to get financing as time went on. The game was doomed from the first reveal.
The setting of the game was the safest possible choice: they sat directly between the two stools of Warcraft and Starcraft, and ended up with off-brand Terran soldiers brandishing big swords in maps full of destructible trees and creep camps.
But the Starcraft folks didn't want heroes in their 1v1, so they took them out of that mode. That left the creep camps sitting around with no actual purpose, so they dithered around for two years tweaking the values of the creeps before taking them out entirely in favor of the Stormgate gimmick, which was rushed into production without any testing, because by that time they were out of money.
In the mean time, they made a whole bunch of boring, forgettable, and sometimes downright stupid-looking units. There were so many of them. There was the bicycle helmet Hedgehog, which took years to finally get replaced with something so nondescript that I guarantee nobody can remember how it looks. They also took the same amount of time to replace the ridiculous robot bathtub Helicarrier with a boring Battlecruiser clone from Temu. And apparently the "space angels" really love to drive triangle vehicles that look like spaceships, but are in fact slow trucks that hover slightly above the ground and shoot tiny pink projectiles with no range that go "plink" and deal almost no damage.
The art style was designed to appeal to the Fortnite generation, but the core audience revolted against it from the moment they saw it. But Frost Giant ignored these critics for years, before they (again too late) tried desperately to redo some of the units and load up the game with a slew of over-the-top special effects and shaders that sometimes made it difficult for players to even see what was going on.
Oh, and they also forgot to make the game fun.
Through the entire five year process of the game's development, Frost Giant demonstrated that they had no idea how to make a good RTS. Even if they had two more years and $20 million more to "cook", it might have lingered on a bit longer, but it wouldn't have changed the game's ultimate trajectory.
Stormgate never had any soul. Every choice was the safe, boring one, and they ended up with a safe, boring game that nobody wanted to play.
Bellular does a good job of covering the main parts of the story, and the controversies (Kickstarter promises, "funded to release", etc) but he misses the larger point about why Stormgate failed.
It wasn't just because the game was "undercooked" and it wasn't because it was much harder to get financing as time went on. The game was doomed from the first reveal.
The setting of the game was the safest possible choice: they sat directly between the two stools of Warcraft and Starcraft, and ended up with off-brand Terran soldiers brandishing big swords in maps full of destructible trees and creep camps.
But the Starcraft folks didn't want heroes in their 1v1, so they took them out of that mode. That left the creep camps sitting around with no actual purpose, so they dithered around for two years tweaking the values of the creeps before taking them out entirely in favor of the Stormgate gimmick, which was rushed into production without any testing, because by that time they were out of money.
In the mean time, they made a whole bunch of boring, forgettable, and sometimes downright stupid-looking units. There were so many of them. There was the bicycle helmet Hedgehog, which took years to finally get replaced with something so nondescript that I guarantee nobody can remember how it looks. They also took the same amount of time to replace the ridiculous robot bathtub Helicarrier with a boring Battlecruiser clone from Temu. And apparently the "space angels" really love to drive triangle vehicles that look like spaceships, but are in fact slow trucks that hover slightly above the ground and shoot tiny pink projectiles with no range that go "plink" and deal almost no damage.
The art style was designed to appeal to the Fortnite generation, but the core audience revolted against it from the moment they saw it. But Frost Giant ignored these critics for years, before they (again too late) tried desperately to redo some of the units and load up the game with a slew of over-the-top special effects and shaders that sometimes made it difficult for players to even see what was going on.
Oh, and they also forgot to make the game fun.
Through the entire five year process of the game's development, Frost Giant demonstrated that they had no idea how to make a good RTS. Even if they had two more years and $20 million more to "cook", it might have lingered on a bit longer, but it wouldn't have changed the game's ultimate trajectory.
Stormgate never had any soul. Every choice was the safe, boring one, and they ended up with a safe, boring game that nobody wanted to play.
Totally agree. Putting "The release was undercooked" in the title is strange. Like it was the main problem. Even if you think the release being undercooked is very important, you gotta think this through for a minute. Undercooked release can never be the reason, it's always a consequence. Why would you release an undercooked game if you can cook it first? :D Why was it undercooked? Because they didn't have enough time. Why didn't they have enough time? Because they ran out of money. Why did they run out of money? Was the budget too small? No, they had at least $43m How did they fail their deadlines and deliver undercooked product, having $43m and ~5 years? Well, we're getting to the real reasons why the game failed. Any adequate answers to this question (not oversaturated market or some other bullshit) will fit better. Mismanagement, lack of direction, lack of original ideas, nepotism (hey, Jesse Brophy!), lack of passion or interest whatsoever. Anything from the list goes.
Bellular does a good job of covering the main parts of the story, and the controversies (Kickstarter promises, "funded to release", etc) but he misses the larger point about why Stormgate failed.
It wasn't just because the game was "undercooked" and it wasn't because it was much harder to get financing as time went on. The game was doomed from the first reveal.
The setting of the game was the safest possible choice: they sat directly between the two stools of Warcraft and Starcraft, and ended up with off-brand Terran soldiers brandishing big swords in maps full of destructible trees and creep camps.
But the Starcraft folks didn't want heroes in their 1v1, so they took them out of that mode. That left the creep camps sitting around with no actual purpose, so they dithered around for two years tweaking the values of the creeps before taking them out entirely in favor of the Stormgate gimmick, which was rushed into production without any testing, because by that time they were out of money.
In the mean time, they made a whole bunch of boring, forgettable, and sometimes downright stupid-looking units. There were so many of them. There was the bicycle helmet Hedgehog, which took years to finally get replaced with something so nondescript that I guarantee nobody can remember how it looks. They also took the same amount of time to replace the ridiculous robot bathtub Helicarrier with a boring Battlecruiser clone from Temu. And apparently the "space angels" really love to drive triangle vehicles that look like spaceships, but are in fact slow trucks that hover slightly above the ground and shoot tiny pink projectiles with no range that go "plink" and deal almost no damage.
The art style was designed to appeal to the Fortnite generation, but the core audience revolted against it from the moment they saw it. But Frost Giant ignored these critics for years, before they (again too late) tried desperately to redo some of the units and load up the game with a slew of over-the-top special effects and shaders that sometimes made it difficult for players to even see what was going on.
Oh, and they also forgot to make the game fun.
Through the entire five year process of the game's development, Frost Giant demonstrated that they had no idea how to make a good RTS. Even if they had two more years and $20 million more to "cook", it might have lingered on a bit longer, but it wouldn't have changed the game's ultimate trajectory.
Stormgate never had any soul. Every choice was the safe, boring one, and they ended up with a safe, boring game that nobody wanted to play.
Totally agree. Putting "The release was undercooked" in the title is strange. Like it was the main problem. Even if you think the release being undercooked is very important, you gotta think this through for a minute. Undercooked release can never be the reason, it's always a consequence. Why would you release an undercooked game if you can cook it first? :D Why was it undercooked? Because they didn't have enough time. Why didn't they have enough time? Because they ran out of money. Why did they run out of money? Was the budget too small? No, they had at least $43m How did they fail their deadlines and deliver undercooked product, having $43m and ~5 years? Well, we're getting to the real reasons why the game failed. Any adequate answers to this question (not oversaturated market or some other bullshit) will fit better. Mismanagement, lack of direction, lack of original ideas, nepotism (hey, Jesse Brophy!), lack of passion or interest whatsoever. Anything from the list goes.
Even ignoring all the money or art style or polish issue, it's just not a great game. The core layer, i.e. the units, just need to get revamped and redesigned from the ground up.
On October 11 2025 02:05 JimmyJRaynor wrote: some interesting back-and-forth between Morten and critics posted on reddit.
Tim Morten is not a game maker. He is more of an administrator... a bureaucrat... a financial guy.. than a game maker. Game Makers ... make games.
guys like Robert Decrescenzo, William Pellen, and Ari Gibson are game makers. The guys who founded Activision are game makers. The small group that made Warcraft 1 and 2 and Starcraft 1 are game makers.
It is pretty hilarious watching all these ex-Blizzard guys get steam rolled without ruthless mofo Uncle Bobby K there to keep these "visionaries" on track to making a working, profitable product.
Perhaps Morhaime and Morten can merge their games and studios together. M&M! Their new game can be... Wild-Storm-Gate by Frost-Haven-Giant-Dreams Studios.
Dreamhaven's first game started decent actually, somewhere at 8k CCU. It dropped quite fast after. Though I don't think it was missmanaged per se. PvP team shooters are probably the hardest genre to get market shares but if you do, also probably the most rewarding.
Bellular does a good job of covering the main parts of the story, and the controversies (Kickstarter promises, "funded to release", etc) but he misses the larger point about why Stormgate failed.
It wasn't just because the game was "undercooked" and it wasn't because it was much harder to get financing as time went on. The game was doomed from the first reveal.
The setting of the game was the safest possible choice: they sat directly between the two stools of Warcraft and Starcraft, and ended up with off-brand Terran soldiers brandishing big swords in maps full of destructible trees and creep camps.
But the Starcraft folks didn't want heroes in their 1v1, so they took them out of that mode. That left the creep camps sitting around with no actual purpose, so they dithered around for two years tweaking the values of the creeps before taking them out entirely in favor of the Stormgate gimmick, which was rushed into production without any testing, because by that time they were out of money.
In the mean time, they made a whole bunch of boring, forgettable, and sometimes downright stupid-looking units. There were so many of them. There was the bicycle helmet Hedgehog, which took years to finally get replaced with something so nondescript that I guarantee nobody can remember how it looks. They also took the same amount of time to replace the ridiculous robot bathtub Helicarrier with a boring Battlecruiser clone from Temu. And apparently the "space angels" really love to drive triangle vehicles that look like spaceships, but are in fact slow trucks that hover slightly above the ground and shoot tiny pink projectiles with no range that go "plink" and deal almost no damage.
The art style was designed to appeal to the Fortnite generation, but the core audience revolted against it from the moment they saw it. But Frost Giant ignored these critics for years, before they (again too late) tried desperately to redo some of the units and load up the game with a slew of over-the-top special effects and shaders that sometimes made it difficult for players to even see what was going on.
Oh, and they also forgot to make the game fun.
Through the entire five year process of the game's development, Frost Giant demonstrated that they had no idea how to make a good RTS. Even if they had two more years and $20 million more to "cook", it might have lingered on a bit longer, but it wouldn't have changed the game's ultimate trajectory.
Stormgate never had any soul. Every choice was the safe, boring one, and they ended up with a safe, boring game that nobody wanted to play.
Totally agree. Putting "The release was undercooked" in the title is strange. Like it was the main problem. Even if you think the release being undercooked is very important, you gotta think this through for a minute. Undercooked release can never be the reason, it's always a consequence. Why would you release an undercooked game if you can cook it first? :D Why was it undercooked? Because they didn't have enough time. Why didn't they have enough time? Because they ran out of money. Why did they run out of money? Was the budget too small? No, they had at least $43m How did they fail their deadlines and deliver undercooked product, having $43m and ~5 years? Well, we're getting to the real reasons why the game failed. Any adequate answers to this question (not oversaturated market or some other bullshit) will fit better. Mismanagement, lack of direction, lack of original ideas, nepotism (hey, Jesse Brophy!), lack of passion or interest whatsoever. Anything from the list goes.
"Undercooked" is a completely wrong term to use here in my opinion. It would suggest that there was something good in the making but it needed a bit more time, like a nice stew that needed just 15 more minutes in the pot. SG was a terrible recipe that was also botched multiple times during the cooking process so calling it "undercooked" doesn't really convey the scale of this disaster.
If SG was just undercooked people wouldn't be mad. There are plenty of games that release in an imperfect and "undercooked" state but when people see potential they keep playing them, creating communities around them and supporting the devs. Such games can then be made better with time. The fact that SG has virtually no players is a pretty clear signal that the game doesn't have any potential in it that people can see so it was doomed from the start.
Edit: FG will probably try to blame it on players expecting too much and them failing to match those expectations. The fact of the matter is that players can be bitchy and will always want something better but they're also super forgiving and understanding if they know what's going on and they are perfectly capable of settling for a smaller scope of a game whose core concept and gameplay are good. Any extra features are just icing on the cake but if the core is rotten there's no amount of extras that will save you.
That's why SG has 50 players peak and MechaBellum has 2k.
The game does not have appeal to attract new players nor does it provide good enough experience to retain players, yet they failed to identify that and went live with horrendous MTX pricing.
As others have said, undercooked or overcooked is not the issue here. The ingredients were never worth cooking in the first place. On top of that they managed to piss off even the most loyal supporters, bad decision after bad decision.
I wonder how much money they really made on all those MTX sales from backers. Was it enough for one monthly salary? Was it worth all the backlash? Imagine if instead of going full greed, they made all heroes and campaigns free to all the backers. A significant portion of negative reviews might never been written, which could lead to more players giving the game a chance, eventually increasing revenue and chance to get new investors. Not saying it would save the game, but maybe a few more decisions not driven by greed would.
They bit off way more than they could chew, generated too high expectations by catering to the fan base of two of the most-polished and refined RTS experiences that you find on the market in WC3 (yeah, forget about Reforged, please) and SC2 by labeling their project the spiritual successor of those games and then massively under-delivered.
The way I see it they could have played it safe in the gameplay department more or less fine, a mechanically rock-solid WC3/SC2 hybrid would have been absolutely OK with people, but they should have prioritized UX over everything else. They didn't actually need to deliver the "next big RTS", it could've been just good enough.
If the game had played like a Blizzard RTS with impeccably tight unit controls (and a different art style!), they would have kept more of the initial target demographic on board, which might have enabled them to tackle more intricate issues like game design, story writing for campaign etc. down the road, but they had to promise the moon and beyond, yet failed so miserably and now this project is essentially dead.
However, to be completely fair here: What did people expect Tim Morton to say at this point? This is as reflected and "self-critical" as he can be as the face of the company while still trying to come off as appealing as he can be for a potential future gig after FG shuts down, as I'm pretty sure they won't find additional funds for this studio.
EPT
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