EPTStormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 279
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Gescom
Canada3507 Posts
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PurE)Rabbit-SF
United States680 Posts
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Spirral
77 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + Based on the video captions, here's a comprehensive summary of what Tim Morten discussed: RTS Genre Market Status Tim Morten shared insights from his experience at Blizzard and EA, stating that while the passionate core RTS audience hasn't diminished, other genres like MOBAs and Battle Royales have eclipsed RTS in terms of market size. He believes RTS can still succeed but would need innovation to match the scale of these larger genres. Stormgate Development Journey Original Vision Founded Frost Giant Studios with Tim Campbell to create a new RTS in the Blizzard style Aimed to create a hybrid between Warcraft and Starcraft styles Built around "Four C's": Campaign, Competitive, Co-op, and Custom game modes Key Challenges Faced External Factors: Market Oversaturation - The number of meaningful game releases has doubled in recent years, creating intense competition for player attention Capital Environment Shift - Started during a venture capital boom (2019-2020), but funding dried up mid-development after the pandemic, forcing scope adjustments Internal Challenges: Scope Issues - Trying to build four distinct game modes simultaneously spread the team too thin Execution Speed - Campaign development was slower than anticipated due to toolchain and creative dependencies Unrealistic Expectations - Set expectations too high for an indie studio competing with Blizzard's 18 years of Starcraft 2 development Lessons Learned and Future Outlook What He Would Do Differently Narrower initial scope for early access while maintaining grand vision for final delivery Better messaging to set appropriate expectations Adapt to changing market conditions more quickly Industry Perspectives Advocates for hybridization model - teams spread across multiple regions to manage costs Suggests leveraging lower-cost labor regions for art and engineering Believes AI will increasingly be necessary for small studios In current conditions, recommends premium over free-to-play business models Current Status and Next Steps Stormgate's launch was not commercially successful Currently seeking partnership opportunities to continue development Plans to license the Stormgate engine to other RTS developers Believes the tech they built represents a significant advancement in RTS development Tim emphasized that while Stormgate didn't achieve its commercial goals, he remains passionate about the genre and hopeful about finding partners to continue the project's development. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17626 Posts
On October 18 2025 20:23 Spirral wrote: Believes the tech they built represents a significant advancement in RTS development LOL, when you have to reduce unit caps for 2v2 it's not a "significant advancement", it's retardation. | ||
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Bacillus
Finland2012 Posts
However, building on top of tech that has one halfway done game and unlikely has any future support sounds like a pretty shaky base for a project unless you absolutely know what you're dealing with. Maybe they can open source and it'll be really interesting to look and mature further, but licensing and building a commercial product on top of it in its current early state sounds like a potentially spooky idea. Depending a little bit on how desperate & hurried they were in getting the game out, the chances are also that the later tweaks and additions aren't exactly pure quality in terms of architecture and documentation and all that. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1112 Posts
On October 18 2025 04:56 Gorsameth wrote: I'm not going to watch a 40 minute video but I assume in that time he blames everything except his vision and execution of the development. He blames markets and not finding enough dumb investors just like every single other time. Please someone that values their time less, is this actually 'the full story'? lol I watched the video, and I wish I could get that 40 minutes of my life back. You're 100% right. He blames everything except his vision and execution of the development. He blames the markets being too crowded and not finding enough investors. There is no new information other than one point at which Tim says that if he had to do it all over again today, he'd make a "premium" game (which is overpaid game executive speak for a game you buy once) instead of a free-to-play game, since it's so hard to make a free-to-play game profitable. One other thing I noticed is that Tim looks very tired and seems like he is just going through the motions when he does his whole spiel about how he's looking for "partners" to save Frost Giant. And he kind of lets slip out that the search is not going well: Ultimately the release was not a commercial success. Really, to keep working on it, we need a partner that is willing to enable us to do that. So my quest, since it was evident that the launch was not going to be a commercial success, has been to explore partnership opportunities. And there are some, um, nothing that's at a stage yet where I'm confident in an outcome (my emphasis) but I do feel like there's some... potential. And in the mean time there is... some amount of work that is going on. Nothing new here, but it's not so much what he is saying as how he is saying it. It's as if he has to keep this delusion going, that some "partner" will just descend from heaven to save Frost Giant, because if he stops believing that, everything in his life collapses. It doesn't sound like a healthy way to live, at least to me. It seems like it's draining the life out of him. Depending a little bit on how desperate & hurried they were in getting the game out, the chances are also that the later tweaks and additions aren't exactly pure quality in terms of architecture and documentation and all that. Having worked at a game publisher with infinite money (I was one of two documentation people trying in vain to support 300+ developers) for ten years, I can tell you with confidence exactly how much documentation Frost Giant has about how Snowplay works. It's zero. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22068 Posts
with a f2p game people are willing to give you a try despite doubting because they might end up liking it. Paying up front they just go buy an actually good game instead. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1112 Posts
On October 19 2025 02:30 Gorsameth wrote: b2p wouldn't help stormgate one bit. Those who consider buying the game already bought into the kickstarter, everyone else wouldn't have grabbed their wallet once they saw the state of early access, let alone release. with a f2p game people are willing to give you a try despite doubting because they might end up liking it. Paying up front they just go buy an actually good game instead. Well, let's face it, nothing would have helped Stormgate. It was just a bad copy of a bad copy, like someone took Starcraft II and photocopied it twelve times over until it was an unreadable mess. Honestly, if they had released it in 1998, it would have been one of those RTS games that everyone ignored and then totally forgot even existed, like Dominion. | ||
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ChillFlame
239 Posts
On October 19 2025 02:18 Bacillus wrote: However, building on top of tech that has one halfway done game and unlikely has any future support sounds like a pretty shaky base for a project unless you absolutely know what you're dealing with. Exactly. There's no support, and no documentation. No sane company would touch this. On October 19 2025 02:18 Bacillus wrote: Maybe they can open source and it'll be really interesting to look and mature further, but licensing and building a commercial product on top of it in its current early state sounds like a potentially spooky idea. Yeah, Tim is in charge, he'd rather choke on it than give something for free. | ||
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ChillFlame
239 Posts
We know of this case for sure, but I'm sure there are others. Who knows how many ideas they had to scrap because they couldn't implement them well. For example, I suspect high player number games like 8v8 or 2v2v2v2 or FFA, are impossible even with low supply caps due to rollback interactions. Having an engine module that helps you to make an RTS game with UE5, but severely limits your possibilities, looks like a bad trade for me. Recoil engine (BAR) supports 50v50 with thousands of units, and it's open source. Why won't you use it instead? | ||
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ScoutWBF
Germany633 Posts
I read so many stutter complaints about UE5 games online, it seems like the engine just isn't working very well. :/ | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17626 Posts
On October 19 2025 18:39 ScoutWBF wrote: I think they should have sticked to UE4 instead of UE5. I read so many stutter complaints about UE5 games online, it seems like the engine just isn't working very well. :/ The engine is working well and there are successful games made with it (including RTS). It does have its quirks but from what I've seen so far most of them boil down to extra software that gpu makers slap onto their drivers than anything else (AMD Adrenalin or MSI Afterburner have a lot of issues with UE5, removing this extra software and going with just clean drivers for your GPU removes all of the problems and improves performance). | ||
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ChillFlame
239 Posts
Everything, including the lighting and performance problems is avoidable, but requires skill and experience, FG clealy lacks. | ||
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ETisME
12676 Posts
On October 20 2025 01:49 Manit0u wrote: The engine is working well and there are successful games made with it (including RTS). It does have its quirks but from what I've seen so far most of them boil down to extra software that gpu makers slap onto their drivers than anything else (AMD Adrenalin or MSI Afterburner have a lot of issues with UE5, removing this extra software and going with just clean drivers for your GPU removes all of the problems and improves performance). UE5 optimization probably takes much more than UE4, a lot of UE5 titles still run suboptimally, while not particularly looking that much better than some other game. Death stranding 2 looks and runs truly like a next gen title. I guess UE5 comes with a lot of benefits, but honestly a lot of those might not mean much to a cartoonist looking game, especially RTS | ||
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Gargonus
24 Posts
I see Spartak is as zealous here as he is on Reddit and Discord. It's so funny how he resorts to every possible logical fallacy, strawman, bending the truth, just to defend a shitty game he poured money in ^^ I have never seen such an amount of bad faith in one single individual. I also expect him to be behind the deletion of all Reddit posts mentioning Tim Morten's weekly LinkedIn post (when we thought it was over last week !). Happy reading ! | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26225 Posts
I think they’ve been wrong on many things, I’ve never particularly considered them to be operating on bad faith, at all. | ||
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Gargonus
24 Posts
Two reddit posts talking about that linkedin post have been removed already. And for the bad faith, I could show you Discord discussions but it's too much of a hassle. But he has proven it plenty of times already in this present thread and on Reddit. He is known for this. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On October 21 2025 05:58 Gargonus wrote: Sorry I should have mentioned it, I was specifically talking about today's post. Two reddit posts talking about that linkedin post have been removed already. And for the bad faith, I could show you Discord discussions but it's too much of a hassle. But he has proven it plenty of times already in this present thread and on Reddit. He is known for this. Reddit is basically broken today because of the AWS outages no? Maybe he’s a tyrant on Discord, not a domain I’ve dwelled in. I shall defer there but I’ve found him a pretty transparent fellow. One I often disagree with mind. | ||
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Gargonus
24 Posts
But these posts have clearly been deleted, it is shown (one of them is mine). Spartak is a good fellow to argue with, I agree : he does not resort to vulgarity, remains polite, and never abuses mod power. He is not a tyrant at all. However he is quick to discard arguments he doesn't agree with and likes to use strawman and other cheap tricks. Often appears as very condescending. Most of the times, people would cite many RTS that succeeded, proving that contrarily to what Tim says, Stormgate did not fail "because this is a RTS". But Spartak would always be like "X is not a RTS / Y succeeded because it didn't aim as high as Stormgate / Stormgate failed because it was impossible in the first place". The guy even went as far as saying that Stormgate's campaign was superior to... AoE 2 campaign. So... yeah. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1112 Posts
But even if this is the case, the mods are now apparently following the time-honored Frost Giant tradition: after having made a terrible mistake, they now refuse to a) fix it or b) even talk about it. I have to say I'm getting a bit tired of /r/Stormgate and actually just tired of following the whole Stormgate saga itself. It just never ends, even when it's clearly supposed to. I need to find a new hobby. | ||
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