Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is an upcoming RTS by PlaySide Studios, who have shipped RTS games in the past and presumably have their own engine already.

The only person in the entire world who ever said that it may have used Frost Giant's "engine" is one random guy on Reddit who provided no evidence and never posted again, after having made only this one post.

For a brief moment people on /r/Stormgate got all excited when it seemed like this random guy had revealed the existence of this game before it was announced, but then someone actually checked and his Reddit post came out after the game had already been announced.

To make matters even more confusing, the random Reddit guy said he overheard some developers saying they "switch to Snowplay and waste one year" which, depending on how you read it, could mean that the developers tried out Snowplay and then abandoned it after a year of work.

Meanwhile, Tim Morten even shouted out Game of Thrones: War for Westeros on LinkedIn once as one of the upcoming RTS games he was looking forward to, yet he didn't bother to mention any connection Frost Giant whatsoever.

On December 10 2025 00:33 WombaT wrote:
I don’t even know if it’s something they can license to others commercially. To my understanding it’s just some propriety layers built atop UE5 for RTS-specific functionality, something UE5 isn’t great at out the box. It’s clearly something FG can do for their own game, as they did it, but I’m unsure if it’s something they can actually sell.

The main issues with trying to sell Snowplay commercially are that there is no documentation and no support.

How does the netcode work? How does the pathfinding code integrate with objects in Unreal? How does literally anything connect to anything? The only people who would know are former Frost Giant employees, who never had time to document it and have probably forgotten a lot of the little details. To figure out how to use it would likely take more time than just building it again from scratch.

And Snowplay was only ever used for one game, which wasn't even finished, and shipped with critical bugs like units randomly dropping player inputs. It also struggled with high unit counts.

Clearly, Frost Giant wanted to be able to license Snowplay to other studios, but simply wanting something doesn't make it happen. Any potential customers would have been turned off by the lack of documentation and support, and that's before Frost Giant went radio silent.

WombaT

Northern Ireland26208 Posts

46 minutes ago

#5962

On December 10 2025 01:53 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
eh, how do you "lock it down". the author takes the knowledge and skills and every code snippet with him. then, go somewhere else, change it by 10% and call it something else. I did that with Stonefield Reports 17 years ago. coupla years later I did it with a language compiler. The vast majority, given the opportunity, does this.

Ok Jimmy whatever you say. Companies just let folks abscond with the source code they got paid for years to develop and repurpose it. Happens all the time, and totally isn’t an area companies have clamped down on in the intervening years

WombaT

Northern Ireland26208 Posts

39 minutes ago

#5963

On December 10 2025 02:07 Jeremy Reimer wrote:

Show nested quote +

The main issues with trying to sell Snowplay commercially are that there is no documentation and no support.

How does the netcode work? How does the pathfinding code integrate with objects in Unreal? How does literally anything connect to anything? The only people who would know are former Frost Giant employees, who never had time to document it and have probably forgotten a lot of the little details. To figure out how to use it would likely take more time than just building it again from scratch.

And Snowplay was only ever used for one game, which wasn't even finished, and shipped with critical bugs like units randomly dropping player inputs.

Clearly, Frost Giant wanted to be able to license Snowplay to other studios, but simply wanting something doesn't make it happen. Any potential customers would have been turned off by the lack of documentation and support, and that's before Frost Giant went radio silent.

I mean we don’t know they haven’t documented it, maybe there’s exhaustive stuff there. I wouldn’t wager on it, but hey.

I’d say one of the problems in licensing is if it’s even licensable in the first place. And if it is, x other game company is going to have to pay both a UE5 licensing fee to epic, and then a Snowplay license on top.

An obvious additional problem is that, on current evidence it’s not even that good anyway. It’s got pretty obvious performance issues. Its pathing isn’t best in class either, Zero Space looks considerably better there.

If you had a module that was say, SC2 level good in terms of engine functionality, or indeed, better then yeah that’s something you can sell to other RTS developers. I can’t say I’ve seen it

Jeremy Reimer

Canada1093 Posts

15 minutes ago

#5964

On December 10 2025 03:37 WombaT wrote:

I mean we don’t know they haven’t documented it, maybe there’s exhaustive stuff there. I wouldn’t wager on it, but hey.

We can safely assume there is no documentation. I worked for 10 years as a technical writer and tools programmer at a division of Activision. We had hundreds of employees and only two tech writers, making it impossible to keep up with documentation. Nevertheless, we managed to have an internal documentation site and maintained what little docs existed and tried (usually in vain) to get help from the developers to extend it.

The thing about developers is that they hate writing documentation. And honestly, I don't really blame them. It takes time away from writing code, adding features, and debugging. But sometimes you really do need it, so management sometimes begrudgingly pays for some resources to create it. For some companies, like Epic, a big part of their business model is in licensing their engine, so they need vast teams with hundreds of tech writers to write public-facing Unreal Engine docs.

Frost Giant was a startup trying to write a new game, and building out their own internal libraries as they went. They had at most 50 employees and zero technical writers. I can guarantee you that no documentation work was done. When would they ever have had time to do it?

I’d say one of the problems in licensing is if it’s even licensable in the first place. And if it is, x other game company is going to have to pay both a UE5 licensing fee to epic, and then a Snowplay license on top.

This is true, and it vastly limits their audience to studios that are a) writing an RTS and b) are committed to Unreal Engine 5, which is like, zero studios right now?

An obvious additional problem is that, on current evidence it’s not even that good anyway. It’s got pretty obvious performance issues. Its pathing isn’t best in class either, Zero Space looks considerably better there.

Indeed. Even given the limited market, they might have found some takers if their "engine" was best-in-class, or did something that no other RTS game could. Like, say, support thousands of units or insane games like 50 vs 50. Like Beyond All Reason does. With its free and open-source engine.