On November 25 2025 05:33 WombaT wrote: The ridiculous part of Tim’s LinkedIn journey is I actually think he’s right on a lot of his points. But they seemingly only occurred to him after his game bombed, so they come across as very sour grapes and out of touch
Yeah. The more interesting stuff is how you assess and navigate those issues while developing the game.
There are plenty of very understandable and human reasons why projects don't work out, but I don't think a lightweight LinkedIn posts are helping. If anything they just make their decision making feel more shallow than it probably actually is.
On November 25 2025 05:33 WombaT wrote: The ridiculous part of Tim’s LinkedIn journey is I actually think he’s right on a lot of his points. But they seemingly only occurred to him after his game bombed, so they come across as very sour grapes and out of touch
"We are not our best intentions. We are what we do", Amy Dickinson.
Ah, the Weekly Post Morten Live-Report Thread. My favourite. This game is truly a phenomenon. Pretty sure this thread has more active users daily than the actual game servers.
In Tim's words he needs to "up my AI game. Get Ready. Or get left behind." Uhhh , Isn't he ready to retire? He should move to a house in the middle of nowhere and hang out with other old people.
btw, Wildgate published and developed by Mike Morhaime's Dreamhaven is close to dying as well. The game released in late July and its now 50% off until December 4th. They had a free weekend and as soon as the free weekend ended it fell to 50 players. It is a multiplayer live service game with 5 teams of 3 competing with each other. So you need more than 50 players for proper balanced competition.
On November 25 2025 23:43 Spirral wrote: Ah, the Weekly Post Morten Live-Report Thread. My favourite. This game is truly a phenomenon. Pretty sure this thread has more active users daily than the actual game servers.
According to the subreddit, there's still 16,000 weekly visitors checking out what's going on.
On November 25 2025 23:43 Spirral wrote: Ah, the Weekly Post Morten Live-Report Thread. My favourite. This game is truly a phenomenon. Pretty sure this thread has more active users daily than the actual game servers.
It's funny that nobody bothered to post the latest Tim Morten LinkedIn rant to Reddit, despite the fact that this is the first time he's even mentioned Frost Giant in a while:
On November 24 2025 Tim Postmorten wrote As I've been trying to find a partner for Frost Giant, I've spoken to a many publishers and investors across the industry. More so than any time I can remember, the trend right now is "how low can you go".
Nothing new, but he's still "trying" to find a "partner" for "Frost Giant". I feel like the sarcasm quotes are appropriate for all three phrases.
If he is only getting offers in the $2 million range, it's not surprising that he wouldn't take them (assuming they are real offers, which I doubt). That would pay for less than two months of Frost Giant's expenses.
He even brings up his former life making crappy licensed games at Savage Entertainment for little money. He can't face going back to that kind of life, now that he's tasted the glory of running his own "AAA" studio.
I don't bother posting Tim's posts as I did before, because they are not really about SG or FG anymore. Except the very last one where he mentions FG.
Other than that, it's just generic crappy thought that anyone with a brain can deduce. He's just posing as a thinker to try and repair his reputation. This is classic LinkedIn slop.
Seeing Spartak having a meltdown on Reddit is waaaay more entertaining !
So at the end of the fairy tale, it turned out to be a colossal fail, slightly in the scammy sense (i remember some people pre-bought a physical copy, which they never even produced, while they even at the time debated about who should pay the shipping costs)
Personally the only adaptable model I see arising as a possible foundation is the Rise of Nations game; I don't know why more people don't enjoy that game; it's has a massive options of classic rts on every level; it has everything a strategy war game can ask for, from swordsmen having at it to laying nuclear waste to your enemies cities.
I cannot phantom that the only reason it is not more played is the lack of any kind of fantasy or Sci-fi, after all, games such as AOE2 and modern warfare remain popular; not even age is a concern as older games remain as popular personal favorites as ever. Say what you like but I still enjoy playing CIV2.
Currently this is indeed "the dark ages" of Real Time Strategy games, and stormgate massively proves that. One day, perhaps in the distant future, there might be some kind of real renaissance, if history is to repeat itself; in the meanwhile, dust your old consoles and games from your shelf's, because if your an avid lover of Real time Strategy games, your in it for the long run.
On November 26 2025 05:54 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Nothing new, but he's still "trying" to find a "partner" for "Frost Giant". I feel like the sarcasm quotes are appropriate for all three phrases.
If he is only getting offers in the $2 million range, it's not surprising that he wouldn't take them (assuming they are real offers, which I doubt). That would pay for less than two months of Frost Giant's expenses.
He even brings up his former life making crappy licensed games at Savage Entertainment for little money. He can't face going back to that kind of life, now that he's tasted the glory of running his own "AAA" studio.
I read this at first as "ruining his own AAA studio". Hahaha. More accurate.
On November 25 2025 23:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote: In Tim's words he needs to "up my AI game. Get Ready. Or get left behind." Uhhh , Isn't he ready to retire? He should move to a house in the middle of nowhere and hang out with other old people.
You'd really think he should be doing the sell your California house and move to Arizona/Texas whatever play that seems to be popular amongst 55 year old Cali vets.
Maybe Tim has expensive taste? Delusions of grandeur? 3 ex-wives? A bad gambling habit. Who knows. I have no idea why a guy who ostensibly made 100k-200k USD for thirty years straight would possibly want to keep working in this space in this way. Run a fucking Pizza Hut in Scottsdale, dude... you have a better chance of success.
You legit can't recover from an L like this. Maybe there was $1M cash left in the FG coffers and he's putting up a front to slowly pocket the rest. I dunno. Lots of speculation about that Silicon Valley Bank loan, but who really knows for real.
Sorry for the triple post, but three different trains of thought. Tim's post yesterday about the death of AA because of funding is particularly hilarious as Expedition 33 prepares to sweep every possible award for 2025.
On November 26 2025 10:05 pebble444 wrote: Personally the only adaptable model I see arising as a possible foundation is the Rise of Nations game; I don't know why more people don't enjoy that game; it's has a massive options of classic rts on every level; it has everything a strategy war game can ask for, from swordsmen having at it to laying nuclear waste to your enemies cities.
I remember getting the Rise of Nations demo... was it the demo? I don't think I bought the full game, because I would probably still have the box for it if I did. Apparently I was really bad at RTS games back then because the computer kicked my ass, rolling up tanks and helicopters to burn my bronze-age civ to the ground. I remember literally having nightmares of losing at Rise of Nations, that's how bad it was.
But I noticed that it's on sale on Steam for like $7 right now so I just picked it up. Maybe I can redeem my past self. Maybe.
Currently this is indeed "the dark ages" of Real Time Strategy games, and stormgate massively proves that. One day, perhaps in the distant future, there might be some kind of real renaissance, if history is to repeat itself; in the meanwhile, dust your old consoles and games from your shelf's, because if your an avid lover of Real time Strategy games, your in it for the long run.
I think it's fine if we are in the dark ages of RTS games. I recently replayed the original Starcraft and Brood War campaigns, and they just kicked ass. Super fun. I hear the multiplayer is pretty good too. And there's Starcraft II and Age of Empires and all sorts of other incredibly fun titles available. They're still great!
For the people who wanted something new, that's fine, but I think it was dumb of Frost Giant to just try and copypasta Starcraft II and Warcraft III, put them in a blender, turn the dial to 2000% More Bland, and call it a day. Nobody wanted or needed that.
I don't know why we can't try out new and different styles of games. They don't have to be clones of old RTS titles. Even Blizzard was always trying new things, like adding heroes in Warcraft III. Genres need to evolve, or they just die.
There's BAR, which is insanely innovative. They managed to repeat the TA boom.
I'll give a one nerdy example.
Buildings in BAR explode when destroyed. This might create chain reactions. You might lose all your economy to one scout if you build your wind turbines close to each other.
You can check the explosion radius by holding space.
You can build lines of buildings by holding shift, and grids by holding shift+alt.
Now the fun part. You can increase or decrease gaps between your buildings by holding shift+alt and pressing z or x.
The game memorizes gaps for every building between games. You need bigger gaps for reactors than wind turbines, etc. So you can build an anti-chain-reaction grid of ~200 wind turbines by shift+alt+LMB. Don't want your workers to make 200 wind turbines one by one? Just hold shift+alt+space+LMB. They will spread and build their own buildings.
Another example. Every destroyed unit hull stays on the ground. It can be salvaged by workers. You can hold E, the circle appears, and you drag the mouse to increase the radius. When you release it, the game will calculate the optimal route between all salvageable objects, so your workers won't waste their time.
You can set automatic control groups with alt, move orders in the shift queue, set quotas for different unit types, etc.
The whole game is like this. It's nothing like SC or WC, it's obviously similar to TA, but there's an insane amount of new features too.
SC2 feels like Dune 2 after I played BAR a few years ago.
I definitely disagree we are in the dark age of RTS.
We might not be getting that many new BIG RTS but there's a lot to play. Aoe4 expansion is extremely fun. AoM remaster was great. Dow4 looking good. BAR is fricking awesome BW remaster is perfectly done Sc2 being f2p
And there is still a few upcoming like zerospace and sanctuary shattered sun, and other interesting looking ones like DORF
Our resident industry visionary has painted another Mona Lisa in the form of a LinkedIn Post
The Limbo
As I've been trying to find a partner for Frost Giant, I've spoken to a many publishers and investors across the industry. More so than any time I can remember, the trend right now is "how low can you go".
I spent the early 2000s building licensed games on small budgets at Savage. A few of them turned out okay (any Transformers PSP players left out there?), many of them underwhelmed (actual player review of He-Man Defender of Grayskull: "I hope the developers die and this game is the last thing they ever see").
After a decade of being forced to cut corners to stay in business at Savage, I was intimately familiar with the trade-offs involved. There's a reason that I followed that period in my life with jobs at EA, Sony Santa Monica, and Blizzard.
I want to build games I can be proud of. With underfunded games, most of the time the only thing you can be proud of is finishing. Very rarely do you strike gold. There are certainly examples, but most games are fundamentally compromised by budget starvation. It's foolish to only point to the successes when these are surrounded by mounds of dead bodies.
This is not an argument for exclusively AAA budgets. Double-A is a perfectly reasonable space to make good games. But this race to the bottom in budgets is killing double-A as a tier.
The budget range that I'm hearing most often today is $2M to $3M. Some lucky developers are getting as much as $5M, but they are the exception. This is all squarely in single-A territory. Which, by the way, is the single most crowded market segment.
I understand the conditions that got us here. But instead of celebrating this state of affairs (funders seem perversely proud of how low they are doing deals), we should be mourning the loss of the middle tier. "How low can you go?" does not lead to a bright future in my opinion.
On November 25 2025 23:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote: In Tim's words he needs to "up my AI game. Get Ready. Or get left behind." Uhhh , Isn't he ready to retire? He should move to a house in the middle of nowhere and hang out with other old people.
You'd really think he should be doing the sell your California house and move to Arizona/Texas whatever play that seems to be popular amongst 55 year old Cali vets.
the thing to do is have a thriving studio in the middle of nowhere. I'm halfway between Toronto and NYC. I can show up to any customers' place in an emergency situation on any day. when i arrived 10+ years ago i got a fully detached house on an acre of land for less than 200K. That is how it done. You can live a great life on 100K/Year in Hamburg, Orchard Park, or Fayetteville. The starting salary I offer new employees is enough to carry a mortgage.
there are a bunch of Software studios in upstate New York. Their client list is all in NYC.
Upstate New York is becoming a hub for starting software development studios due to a combination of government initiatives, investment, and a growing ecosystem of support . Factors like the state's Digital Game Development Program, the "NY SMART I-Corridor Tech Hub" initiative, and organizations like Launch NY provide funding and resources that make the region attractive for tech entrepreneurs. Factors supporting the growth of software development startups
Government programs: The state's Digital Game Development Program offers incentives to offset costs for digital game development, creating a supportive environment for software studios. Several Upstate cities are also competing for federal funding as part of the "NY SMART I-Corridor Tech Hub" initiative, which aims to boost the region's tech sector. Investment and funding: The region is attracting significant investment, with a dedicated data platform and investor networks like Launch NY providing opportunities for startups to get funded. Growing ecosystem: A collaborative ecosystem is developing across the region, from Albany to Buffalo. Universities like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are focusing on areas like quantum computing, and organizations are fostering mentorship and startup support. Specific examples: The growth of new studios, such as those established by former employees of a now-closed studio, indicates a vibrant and active community. Major investments, like Micron Technology's semiconductor plant, also contribute to the area's broader tech boom.
Rob Pardo has done an even better job than Tim. He left Blizzard in 2014 and has yet to produce a product. His studio has 3 "Company CUlture Managers" and 2 "Universe Builders".
Imagine working at Pardo's place for 3 years, say from 2017 to 2020, and nothing got made. It is a Dilbert cartoon strip that's been going on for 10 years now.
On November 27 2025 02:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Rob Pardo has done an even better job than Tim. He left Blizzard in 2014 and has yet to produce a product. His studio has 3 "Company CUlture Managers" and 2 "Universe Builders".
Imagine working at Pardo's place for 3 years, say from 2017 to 2020, and nothing got made. It is a Dilbert cartoon strip that's been going on for 10 years now.
Standard tech though. It can be tragic at times. VC makes 10x$10M bets, and one of them makes $250M. A person could ostensibly go 0/10 in their career and never do anything. I myself am like 2/8... but it means that the last time I did anything meaningful was like brief stints in 2010-2012 and 2019-2022. It's draining on the soul. Heh. Am I in purgatory for the next few years? Yeah probably. Current project is circling the drain... slowly. I'm sure everyone on Stormgate knew in 2023 that they were fucked and spent 2y trying to "look busy".
EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/oy9a9CD.png)
