On April 11 2026 03:44 Jeremy Reimer wrote: - If you aren't paying attention to what's happening with AI-driven development inside giants like Meta right now, you should be: software development is fundamentally changing
Tim is BS-ing again.
Crack open a copy of Visual Basic 6 from 1999. No intellisense, no Inheritance. Then check out Visual Studio 2005. It is a night and day difference in just 6 years. Software development 'fundamentally changed' from 1999 to 2005. Software development has been "fundamentally changing" for 27 years...and probably longer than that. It keeps getting easier and easier.
the reason there are 87 bazillion new RTS games arriving on Steam is that it is far easier to make a video game in 2026 than it was in 2000. So there is no need to give Tim any money. Him and 3 other guys should be able to crank out a game working out of their garage.
Of course FG made ~$1m and spent ~$43m because of geopolitics. People are too stingy nowdays. The last time it was market oversaturation IIRC. He'll blame Jesus the next time, I swear it.
in a general sense games have gotten easier to make. but player expectations have outpaced the gains in dev capability, such that WC2 took a year to make, and a modern RTS can spend ~45M over 6 years and still be stuck in development hell with a half finished product.
as for AI, in the words of Sam Altman, "this time feels different." Gotta agree with him (and Tim) on this one. The latest models are really good at coding and only getting better. Though IME vibecoding game dev eventually veers out of control (as opposed to web dev which is simple enough for the AIs to stay on the tracks) it still would still help a great deal on a codebase that's been written (mostly) by humans, such that in theory a human could take over the wheel if needed, but still lean on the AI for a lot.
On April 13 2026 07:04 townhouse wrote: in a general sense games have gotten easier to make. but player expectations have outpaced the gains in dev capability, such that WC2 took a year to make, and a modern RTS can spend ~45M over 6 years and still be stuck in development hell with a half finished product.
as for AI, in the words of Sam Altman, "this time feels different." Gotta agree with him (and Tim) on this one. The latest models are really good at coding and only getting better. Though IME vibecoding game dev eventually veers out of control (as opposed to web dev which is simple enough for the AIs to stay on the tracks) it still would still help a great deal on a codebase that's been written (mostly) by humans, such that in theory a human could take over the wheel if needed, but still lean on the AI for a lot.
You have a good point on player expectations, I’d probably add those of publishers or investors to that too.
Many things can be simultaneously true.
It’s been considerably easier to make studio quality music in one’s bedroom on a budget for 15/20 years, but simultaneously harder to make a living doing original material for a good while. Exacerbated now AI slop is bombarding streaming platforms.
I see that becoming an increasing problem in the indie space. It was already hard to punch through lazy slop facilitated by easier production and distribution, that’ll no doubt get worse.
Not an area I’m especially familiar with but I imagine the self-publishing space for authors that opened up as a viable avenue for many is going to be similarly afflicted with AI slop.
Tim isn’t entirely off base with some things he says, but entirely incorrect to blame any of it for Stormgate bombing.
WDYM by player expectations outpacing gains in development?
Back in the day there was no capable enough Internet connection to download patches, so release verson was a final version most of the times. You fail with that, you get "Buggerfalled".
Nowdays companies are releasing half baked "Early Acess" slop, and people are fine with it. Expectations are low as hell.
Not to mention competition. You can google best games of 2000-2007 per year and compare it with best games of 2020-2026. There were dozens of legenary games every year, If you released something that was just fine, it might be still destroyed by press and players for mediocrity. Nowdays people think a buggy poorly designed mess like Helldivers 2 is something incredible.
Meanwhile, the indie devs are just fine making comparable products with shorter development cycles, despite having severely less resources.
I dunno, sounds like gamedev companies are just making exscuses, because they can't compete.
There is a design by accountant (well actually marketing) problem. Where all the big games are always trying to appeal the largest, broadest audience at all times. Their publisher, or shareholders, or the shareholders of their publisher always wants some expected features, and for the game to appeal to 'know trends/tendencies'.
Big developers used to be able to developed to a relatively niche group of people, and sometimes the games turn out good enough that it finds broad appeal even in audiences it didn't specifically target. You still see the same thing happens with really popular/viral indy games. But sometimes they are just cult classics that really appeal to that niche.
Big publishers/developers can't afford to make cult classics that a niche really likes anymore, so they always start with default requirements of broad appeal/reach. People do still appreciate something fresh and innovative in games. It's difficult to be innovative, competent, AND start with the baggage that the money people who don't care about the games, only the potential profit it will make, impose right at the start of developement.
Note - not talking about Stormgate, I think Tim is delusional here, but just a few further observations about expectations
For one, I guess ‘gamer expectations’ don’t really exist, if they ever did, so I’ll give that caveat. But it’s probably an even more diverse consumer base than it was in my formative years in the 90s/2000s
I’ve been replaying a fair few of my childhood favourites, one thing I’ve noticed is how short some of them are, provided they’re relatively linear
This wasn’t really a problem when I was young, worse at games, was less familiar with ‘game design logic’ etc, they’d still take a fair amount of time. Plus often there was the wow factor that comes with relative novelty.
Graphical fidelity is a big one, or at least a good art style, ideally both.
I’d say a tolerance for janky voice acting, if it is even employed is definitely a lot lower than it used to be
Individually I can’t imagine them being massive budgetary factors, but in combination one can see expenses ballooning a bit. But it’s very genre dependent, or indeed developer/customer dependent.
Most modern AAA action-adventure games are gigantic compared to their forebears. They’ll invariably have elements of the ‘Ubisoft formula’, big, often complex open world environments, lots of it, some RPG or attribute/levelling system. They’ll be pretty, they’ll have tons of cutscenes and quality voice-acting throughout.
I think the Hellblade games are great experiences, perhaps not great games but I love em. But many are critical of them being too short to playthrough, when they’re actually pretty comparable to many hall-of-fame games from the ‘golden age’ in that respect.
Of course, one doesn’t have to make games like that, but I think consumers definitely expect more than they used to in that particular type of game.
I think we can draw some parallels to film here. It’s long been possible, or even assisted with modern tools to make an indie or a AA at a consistent, or even decreasing budget than prior. But to make a AAA or big blockbuster those costs don’t tend to drop, indeed may increase because you’re constantly trying to raise the bar along with expectations. And your catchment area will tend towards a more general, casual audience.
While an amateur filmmaker will use modern tech to do things they couldn’t do before, cheaper, the big blockbuster will use it to really push the boat out to deliver yet more spectacle.
On April 13 2026 13:27 doubleupgradeobbies! wrote: There is a design by accountant (well actually marketing) problem. Where all the big games are always trying to appeal the largest, broadest audience at all times. Their publisher, or shareholders, or the shareholders of their publisher always wants some expected features, and for the game to appeal to 'know trends/tendencies'.
Big developers used to be able to developed to a relatively niche group of people, and sometimes the games turn out good enough that it finds broad appeal even in audiences it didn't specifically target. You still see the same thing happens with really popular/viral indy games. But sometimes they are just cult classics that really appeal to that niche.
Big publishers/developers can't afford to make cult classics that a niche really likes anymore, so they always start with default requirements of broad appeal/reach. People do still appreciate something fresh and innovative in games. It's difficult to be innovative, competent, AND start with the baggage that the money people who don't care about the games, only the potential profit it will make, impose right at the start of developement.
Yeah, and what tends to happen there is a degree of lag. Publishers chase the current trend, but by the time a development cycle completes, either gamers have become tired of x formula, or alternatively the games that got in early have an almost unbreakable hold on whatever genre we’re talking.
I think it’s a very flawed strategy indeed, I can’t really recall it working all that well. At least if we’re talking chasing trends rather than having already cornered a market with a big IP and milking it.
It feels very flawed to me, it’s like running a record label and putting all your eggs in the ‘let’s find the next Taylor Swift’ basket, only she already exists. And it takes longer to make a game than a record.
How it tends to work in that industry is you have a portfolio that’s pretty varied, and you’ll have your cookie cutter types, and maybe you’ll take a shot on someone a bit different. Oftentimes you hit paydirt with the latter rather than the former, albeit it’s not something you can rely on. If it were down to the money men or investors, they’d probably swing you away from a Billie Eilish or a Chapelle Roan, but they ended up getting pretty huge.
I couldn’t see most of the current big-hitters giving a AAA budget to something as idiosyncratic as say, Metal Gear Solid these days if it were a new IP.
But after a flurry of discussion, Spartak locked the thread "due to high number of rule breaking comments." There was, at most, one rule-breaking comment in the thread, but he had already deleted it.
Honestly, I don't think anyone has worked at Frost Giant since August or September of last year. I do think that Tim Morten has been stringing people along by constantly saying that "conversations" with "potential partners" are "promising" and this got enough people to hope that, in fact, enough money to restart the company was just around the corner.
It was seven months ago now (September 2025) that Tim Morten posted "For the sake of players, and the team, I'm hoping to have a meaningful update in the weeks ahead." Ever since then, he's continued to tease that "discussions are in progress" to find this mythical partner. Meaningful updates, however, remain absent.
At some point even the most faithful of the True Believers start to lose hope.
EDIT: Gobsmack has replied to the locked thread:
As my work history here shows I started working full time for STG back in November. I was still volunteering time on Stormgate to wrap the Community Update up until it released, which is where the overlap comes from.
The reason I hid that work change is exactly because I knew there were people combing through the LinkedIn profiles of FG employees looking for every chance to dunk on the game and I didn't want to distract from our efforts. A lot of awesome people worked on the Community Update and it wouldn't be fair to them to derail that.
He makes a fair point, even if he was hiding the truth. And he did acknowledge that the Community Update was done entirely by volunteers, which was more than Tim Morten ever did.
So I heard the game is shutting down in 2-3 days... Is that correct? Will everyone lose access to the game then or is there some way to keep playing? This whole situation just seems so odd to me. I found out about it on reddit, apparently a random dev posted this news on discord. Has Tim Morten really said nothing about the game shutting down and it's going offline in 2 days? I know he talked about the game obviously not being a success and pursuing a 2nd title but there is like no official announcement to players it will be inaccessible - or if they found a way to keep the servers online. I feel so in the dark. What is happening
On April 27 2026 16:36 CicadaSC wrote: So I heard the game is shutting down in 2-3 days... Is that correct? Will everyone lose access to the game then or is there some way to keep playing? This whole situation just seems so odd to me. I found out about it on reddit, apparently a random dev posted this news on discord. Has Tim Morten really said nothing about the game shutting down and it's going offline in 2 days? I know he talked about the game obviously not being a success and pursuing a 2nd title but there is like no official announcement to players it will be inaccessible - or if they found a way to keep the servers online. I feel so in the dark. What is happening
They said their server company is doing AI stuff now and they don't have a new server company. It was made public some 4-5 weeks ago that the game (definitely multiplayer, probably singleplayer as well) will be unplayable come May.
On April 27 2026 16:36 CicadaSC wrote: So I heard the game is shutting down in 2-3 days... Is that correct? Will everyone lose access to the game then or is there some way to keep playing? This whole situation just seems so odd to me. I found out about it on reddit, apparently a random dev posted this news on discord. Has Tim Morten really said nothing about the game shutting down and it's going offline in 2 days? I know he talked about the game obviously not being a success and pursuing a 2nd title but there is like no official announcement to players it will be inaccessible - or if they found a way to keep the servers online. I feel so in the dark. What is happening
They said their server company is doing AI stuff now and they don't have a new server company. It was made public some 4-5 weeks ago that the game (definitely multiplayer, probably singleplayer as well) will be unplayable come May.
On April 27 2026 16:36 CicadaSC wrote: So I heard the game is shutting down in 2-3 days... Is that correct? Will everyone lose access to the game then or is there some way to keep playing? This whole situation just seems so odd to me. I found out about it on reddit, apparently a random dev posted this news on discord. Has Tim Morten really said nothing about the game shutting down and it's going offline in 2 days? I know he talked about the game obviously not being a success and pursuing a 2nd title but there is like no official announcement to players it will be inaccessible - or if they found a way to keep the servers online. I feel so in the dark. What is happening
They said their server company is doing AI stuff now and they don't have a new server company. It was made public some 4-5 weeks ago that the game (definitely multiplayer, probably singleplayer as well) will be unplayable come May.
On April 27 2026 16:36 CicadaSC wrote: So I heard the game is shutting down in 2-3 days... Is that correct? Will everyone lose access to the game then or is there some way to keep playing? This whole situation just seems so odd to me. I found out about it on reddit, apparently a random dev posted this news on discord. Has Tim Morten really said nothing about the game shutting down and it's going offline in 2 days? I know he talked about the game obviously not being a success and pursuing a 2nd title but there is like no official announcement to players it will be inaccessible - or if they found a way to keep the servers online.
You're right to be confused. The "official" announcement about the shutdown was on Discord, on March 31st, posted by Harrison King aka Gobsmack. He said:
* Our game server orchestration partner, Hathora, has been purchased by an AI company, and they are winding down their service at the end of April. This will create a planned outage for Stormgate's multiplayer modes. * Stormgate will be patched so that it can be played offline, but online modes will not be available at that point. * We hope to restore online play in a future patch, but this work will be dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations.
Of course there was immediate confusion about what "Frost Giant finding a partner" meant, with some people assuming it referred to finding a new server provider. But that made no sense because Hathora already had a preferred server migration provider and other game companies had already migrated to it. Instead, it was the mythical "partner" that Tim Morten had been searching for in vain ever since the failed launch of Stormgate.
Tim Morten said nothing until mid-April, when he posted a confirmation on LinkedIn:
- You may have already seen the coverage, but with Stormgate's game server partner exiting the space (purchased by an AI company), online play will be interrupted at the end of April; single player modes will continue to work, and various paths forward for online are being explored - Frost Giant's future path as a whole remains uncertain; partnership conversations continue, and I hope to have better clarity soon
He hopes to have better clarity soon! Soon being some time before the heat death of the universe, one imagines.
There was supposed to be a patch for the main game to support playing the campaign offline, but that hasn't arrived yet, at least not fully (apparently you can load campaign maps into the editor and play them that way, but I haven't confirmed that this works). Frost Giant's former server developer posted in Discord that they were "exploring" adding Steam peer-to-peer support that would enable at least custom games to be played between multiple people using Steam's built-in services. However, there is no date for this work to be completed, and it's unclear if it would still require additional funding to do so, or if former employees are willing to volunteer their time the way they did for the Community Patch. Nobody knows!
I feel so in the dark. What is happening
What is happening is that this company and game can't even wind down properly. Right now they are still selling the "Ultimate Edition" on Steam for like $60, and MTX items are still being sold in the in-game store, mere days before the servers shut down forever.
On April 28 2026 22:37 Jeremy Reimer wrote: [What is happening is that this company and game can't even wind down properly. Right now they are still selling the "Ultimate Edition" on Steam for like $60, and MTX items are still being sold in the in-game store, mere days before the servers shut down forever.
Thank you for mentioning this.
It feels like I wake up in a cryo-capsule, and everyone is fine with stunts like this. Never thought I would be in the scuffed version of Demolition Man, but here I am.
I wish Ross Scott the best luck, I hope we will get somewhere. There are already 2 lawsuits against Ubisoft AFAIK.
I shipped a game on Steam this year. It's been interesting navigating Steamworks and the Steam backend. It's by no means as simple as you'd think, but you could still remove DLC or change DLC to be free in the Store in a matter of minutes, and you could push a 1-liner patch to the game in about an hour to turn off the in-game store.
Pretty tragic shit all around that they can't be bothered, but to be honest, it was their poor handling of monetization that brought me raging into this thread back in August when I wasted $20 by buying the campaign components 'in the wrong order' because of their terrible handling of Steam DLC + the in-game store in the first place. First product in history where the 'recommended bundle' cost more the sum of the individual components. Haha.
Is that poor handling, or good handling for Tim's interests? I dunno if it's just reading all the LinkedIn poison through this thread, but enough of that and I wonder how genuine the attempt at an RTS revival really was.
Certainly, continuing to sell $60 packages right up until shutdown doesn't help with that image.
On April 29 2026 09:35 Turbovolver wrote: Is that poor handling, or good handling for Tim's interests? I dunno if it's just reading all the LinkedIn poison through this thread, but enough of that and I wonder how genuine the attempt at an RTS revival really was.
Certainly, continuing to sell $60 packages right up until shutdown doesn't help with that image.
I believe the attempt was genuine, but I think the main problem was that all the leadership at Frost Giant thought they were supremely talented because they had worked at Blizzard at one point.
Tim Morten thought he was talented because he was briefly a Project Manager for the final expansion of Starcraft II.
Tim Campbell thought he was talented because he had worked on the Warcraft III expansion.
Kevin "Monk" Dong thought he was talented because he had helped with Starcraft II's co-operative mode.
The only person with any real talent on the Stormgate team was the artist who made the Celestial theme music. That shit was, and is, banging.
But everyone else was resting on laurels that they had never earned in the first place. Their "work" at Blizzard was mostly done by others, people who weren't the Big Names. Artists and programmers who knew the craft of game design. People who toiled at lower than industry-standard wages because they wanted to make something amazing.
Reading this early interview with the Frost Giant leadership team is kind of eye-opening in retrospect. None of these people had any idea about what they wanted to build. They couldn't even decide whether they wanted it to be Starcraft-like or Warcraft-like. They repeated this indecision every time they had a difficult question. Did they want heroes or no heroes? Yes. Did they want to make the game easier for new players, or focus on the high-end esports professionals? Yes.
Everything about the game landed in the mushy middle, because everyone in a leadership position was completely unable to lead.
The nonsense with screwing up everything involving the pricing, screwing over their most dedicated early backers, writing fake reviews on Steam and using fake accounts on Reddit... I can't even begin to understand the sheer stupidity required to make those decisions.
On April 29 2026 09:35 Turbovolver wrote: Is that poor handling, or good handling for Tim's interests? I dunno if it's just reading all the LinkedIn poison through this thread, but enough of that and I wonder how genuine the attempt at an RTS revival really was.
Certainly, continuing to sell $60 packages right up until shutdown doesn't help with that image.
Its good handling as long as people are fine with it.
For example, tim2 is as dishonest as tim1, they made the same shitty decisions together. The only difference is tim2 kept his mouth shut, and tim1 took the hit.
And you know what? Tim 2 finds a job in CDPR. Both CDPR leadership and players are fine with it. He got his $1.5m from SG, he got a new cool job. No one sued his ass or made him accountable in any way.
He can do it 3 years after, and people will be still fine with it.
EPT
