On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS?
Yes. The existence of worse RTS games does not change that fact.
Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Yes. Stormgate was a failure, and I pin the failure on the design of the game itself.
Frost Giant chose to make it a bizarre combination of Warcraft and Starcraft clones. No venture capital firm forced them to make trees and guys with swords a design priority in their space combat game. VC guys did not insist that they choose a "post-post-apocalyptic" setting that made no sense and was ultimately abandoned. They didn't decide that what Stormgate really needed was a thin, confusing, dumb, and poorly thought-out backstory.
None of them forced Frost Giant to make bland, mobile-like graphics, even when there was overwhelming opposition from their own audience.
Nobody insisted that Frost Giant put in boring creeps, twiddle with them uselessly for years, and then finally rip them out and put in nonsensical Stormgates.
These VC firms did not demand that Frost Giant waste tons of time and money on rollback netcode and triple tick rates that ultimately made no difference to the gameplay. They didn't direct Frost Giant to create a game with ridiculously high hardware requirements that ran poorly on the computers most people owned.
VCs care about one thing: return on investment. They don't care how you do it, just that you do it. Frost Giant made all their own terrible design decisions, refused to listen to feedback, then when they finally, desperately, tried to make changes based on the overwhelmingly negative feedback, it was too little and too late. By that point, they had already spent all the money they were ever going to get, and the result was a bland, boring, poorly-designed failure of a game.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
OMG, I cannot disagree more, DoW3 , I genuinely logged 90 hours into it, loved it, had 3v3 ,4v4 funzies with friends, bought 5 or 6 copies for myself and friends. And went on to get top 4 finish in ESL beta tournament. And my fun trying to revenge this protosss GM that was my ladder nemesis who kept 8 gate zeal me vs my stupid terran, which I tried everything cannot win. And he was a big time streamer in Dow3. All that said, I barely touched stormgate, tried a few game and ran the other way. I still bitch about how my space marine clump of units get evaporated by eldar hero abiliities, imba! But that's another story, I still had fun doing my brand of shit build for funzies.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
OMG, I cannot disagree more, DoW3 , I genuinely logged 90 hours into it, loved it, had 3v3 ,4v4 funzies with friends, bought 5 or 6 copies for myself and friends. And went on to get top 4 finish in ESL beta tournament. And my fun trying to revenge this protosss GM that was my ladder nemesis who kept 8 gate zeal me vs my stupid terran, which I tried everything cannot win. And he was a big time streamer in Dow3. All that said, I barely touched stormgate, tried a few game and ran the other way. I still bitch about how my space marine clump of units get evaporated by eldar hero abiliities, imba! But that's another story, I still had fun doing my brand of shit build for funzies.
Well, DoW 3 is considered one of the biggest RTS flops of all time. IMO, its second only to Homeworld 3. Maybe it's a 3-rd place after Homeworld 3 and SG. It's hard to argue with 50% review score. If you like it, it's fine, as I said I like jank games too. I like color palette, knights and WAAGH! towers. That's it :D. Well, there isn't a single thing I like about SG, so it's 3:0 for DoW 3. The knight model has more personality than all SG units combined.
On September 14 2026 20:54 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: I have a question
Stormagate as a game product itself is cata failure.
But we don't really know how much tech stack , art asset pipeline etc is wroth in liquidation and saas value
:O
anyone has any possible idea?
I can’t see how it would be much.
If the engine was shit hot even if the game was hot shit, that would be an asset, but it really was pretty underwhelming in terms of performance and optimisation
On September 14 2026 20:54 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: I have a question
Stormagate as a game product itself is cata failure.
But we don't really know how much tech stack , art asset pipeline etc is wroth in liquidation and saas value
:O
anyone has any possible idea?
Nearly worthless IMO.
AI assets are significantly better than what FG made. And I hate LLM bullshit much more than I hate FG :D Tech is too specific to be useful most likely. You have to find a UE5 RTS dev to try to sell it. And I don't think they'll buy. Anecdotal case: a bright FG dev tried to solve very hard and complex problem of custom hotkeys for months, because UE5 doesn't have it. Plot twist: UE5 has inbox solution, but reading documentation is hard.
On September 14 2026 20:54 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: I have a question
Stormagate as a game product itself is cata failure.
But we don't really know how much tech stack , art asset pipeline etc is wroth in liquidation and saas value
:O
anyone has any possible idea?
Nearly worthless IMO.
AI assets are significantly better than what FG made. And I hate LLM bullshit much more than I hate FG :D Tech is too specific to be useful most likely. You have to find a UE5 RTS dev to try to sell it. And I don't think they'll buy. Anecdotal case: a bright FG dev tried to solve very hard and complex problem of custom hotkeys for months, because UE5 doesn't have it. Plot twist: UE5 has inbox solution, but reading documentation is hard.
I remember a Reddit post where someone complained about custom hotkeys taking so long to arrive, and voidlegacy (aka Tim Morten) replied with something along the lines of "That's a stupid criticism anyway. Learn grid." The CEO of an RTS company, ladies and gentlemen!
No, the "tech stack" is really just a couple of unsupported, undocumented, and poorly performing Unreal Engine plugins that handle unit pathfinding and networking, badly. The "art asset pipeline" is a bunch of bland, forgettable, and unoptimized 3D models that use too many polygons. Together these are worth almost nothing.
Not much else happening on the Stormgate front. I noticed that Kevin "Monk" Dong has finally updated his LinkedIn to accurately show his employment history:
The last time he did that, Gobsmack made him change it back. That was back when they were still pretending Frost Giant was a real company.
EDIT: There's also a new Postmortem video about Stormgate on YouTube:
Nothing new here, just another recap of everything we already know.
On September 15 2026 00:46 Jeremy Reimer wrote: I remember a Reddit post where someone complained about custom hotkeys taking so long to arrive, and voidlegacy (aka Tim Morten) replied with something along the lines of "That's a stupid criticism anyway. Learn grid." The CEO of an RTS company, ladies and gentlemen!
I'm all it for the grid setup, but it was so arrogant :D And man didn't have balls to use his main account. People have preferences. And it's very important. Not understanding it is telling.
I am used to all kind of RTS control schemes. I'm fine with Dune2, C&C, WC1, or AoE1. I can switch within 30 minutes. But even I could never go deeply into the Homeworld series because of the controls. Their more conventional game "Deserts of Kharak" has the most torturous control scheme I've seen. Both "order" and "rotate camera" are RMB. You don't release RMB instantly once, your camera goes spinnin'. And they don't have any customization at all. I don't really understand how people play this game. You can rebind some of the hotkeys with the .cfg file, but not all of them.
Every man has his limits, for me it's "Deserts of Kharak", for some people this it's a forced grid setup. Bottlnecking the size of your playerbase with insignificant problems like this one is truly short-sighted.
Meanwhile, BAR has hotkeys for moving orders inside the shift queue, add orders in front of queue, recycle/build extractors in area calculates the optimal course between targets, build in line/grid, mark targets for focus fire before the engagement, etc.
That's why it is so hilarious hearing suits talking about innovation, while adding nothing new (or even less) compared to a 2010 game. Meanwhile volunteers making an open source game already implemented more than you can imagine.
Nothing new here, just another recap of everything we already know.
they did not have "every ingredient for the next great RTS" and the "and they blew" part is not possible. they didn't blow anything. they fooled some investors into giving them money.
the line sounds very dramatic though. maybe not as good as "buying the stairway to heaven" ... but its good drama.
How much explanations are needed here? Is this being kept alive in hopes it makes a resurgence or just beating the dead horse and recycling / repeating / regurgitating the same explanations over and over and over again? How in the world do we still focus so much on these miniscule details about people / waste our time going back and forth talking about the same people / same stuff with really no purpose or point going forward.
On September 25 2026 09:19 TelecoM wrote: How much explanations are needed here? Is this being kept alive in hopes it makes a resurgence or just beating the dead horse and recycling / repeating / regurgitating the same explanations over and over and over again? How in the world do we still focus so much on these miniscule details about people / waste our time going back and forth talking about the same people / same stuff with really no purpose or point going forward.
It's a bit more of the dead horse thing, but there's a reason the dead horse keeps getting beaten. It's because it isn't actually a dead horse. It's more of an undead horse.
That's because Frost Giant and Tim Morten never actually announced that development of the game had stopped, much less that the studio had shuttered. They said nothing, while keeping the Frost Giant website up and running, and that invited endless speculation. There are still people who come into the Discord asking if there's any news about future development of the game.
The latest such inquiry, which just happened today, led to this response from Gobsmack (Harrison King). He's ended up becoming the only remaining spokesperson for the game. It's as close to an admission of the end as we are ever likely to get:
It took a while, but we finally got there. Rest in peace, Stormgate horse.
On September 25 2026 09:19 TelecoM wrote: How much explanations are needed here? Is this being kept alive in hopes it makes a resurgence or just beating the dead horse and recycling / repeating / regurgitating the same explanations over and over and over again? How in the world do we still focus so much on these miniscule details about people / waste our time going back and forth talking about the same people / same stuff with really no purpose or point going forward.
It's a bit more of the dead horse thing, but there's a reason the dead horse keeps getting beaten. It's because it isn't actually a dead horse. It's more of an undead horse.
That's because Frost Giant and Tim Morten never actually announced that development of the game had stopped, much less that the studio had shuttered. They said nothing, while keeping the Frost Giant website up and running, and that invited endless speculation. There are still people who come into the Discord asking if there's any news about future development of the game.
The latest such inquiry, which just happened today, led to this response from Gobsmack (Harrison King). He's ended up becoming the only remaining spokesperson for the game. It's as close to an admission of the end as we are ever likely to get:
It took a while, but we finally got there. Rest in peace, Stormgate horse.
again, I don't know why i have to come back to this thread every few weeks or a month to correct misinformation, but just because stormgate is done doesn't mean there isn't a stormgate 2 or a 2nd frost giant game in production, as Tim Morten has gone on record and said in a video interview with harstem, yes, he is making a second frost giant game. He is going to use the lessons learned from stormgate to make that successful.
That's what he was hoping for but at least so far, he hasn't seem to have managed to secure funding to develop such a new game. Frost Giant devs have all moved on as well even if some haven't updated their LinkedIn profiles.
CicadaSC, are you an alien? Honest answer please :D I'll promise to move on from this thread forever after you answer me. Even Sparty tells you to keep hands on the table, and I would listen to the man in cases like this.
On September 26 2026 02:13 ChillFlame wrote: CicadaSC, are you an alien? Honest answer please :D
This is a bit mean. CircadaSC can't let go of the fact that Tim Morten did indeed say he was "working" on a second game. But Tim followed that statement up with a clarification that development would require additional funding.
CircadaSC has consistently dismissed that clarification, offering baseless speculation that perhaps Tim is self-funding the second game (he is not) or that he has somehow secured funding that he hasn't told anyone else about (also untrue). We know these claims are false, because if either of them were true, Tim would have already rehired a subset of former employees, which he has not done.
Sure, Tim could claim to be "working" on a game even if the "work" is just thinking about it, but CircadaSC's statement is that the second game is in production. This is false. "Production" of a game requires funding and employees.
Do we have to wait until the heat death of the universe before CircadaSC admits that "Stormgate 2" isn't a thing? Perhaps, but if we all hold out until May 1, 2027, the date Frost Giant must repay the entirety of the $2 million loan (of which $1.9 million is still outstanding) back to Silicon Valley Bank, we may finally have definitive closure on the matter.
For my part, I have to admit a strange desire to not let the story go. It's been a crazy ride following the whole thing, and doing a deep dive into financials and financing and CEO sockpuppet Reddit accounts, among other fascinating rabbit holes. I'm not the only one: there have been many more YouTube retrospective videos on Stormgate than a game maximizing at under 5k CCU ever warranted. It's like a weird kind of brain worm that gets into your head and never lets go.
Well, I'm willing to try to let it go. Again. Maybe this time it will stick.
On September 26 2026 03:00 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Do we have to wait until the heat death of the universe before CircadaSC admits that "Stormgate 2" isn't a thing?
Exactly, he will be right forever. Because if you assume SG69 is in the works 'till Tim says otherwise, there's no way to be wrong. Even if Tim passes away, there's a hope his heir will finish the job, then an heir of his heir, and so on.
P.S. "I return from time to time to bring justice to this damned thread filled with misinformation" really improved my mood.
BTW, the game is still selling on Steam with this awesome description: "Stormgate is a free-to-play real-time strategy game with a full single-player campaign, 3-player co-op, and PvP versus modes on over 60 maps. Our Editor is also freely available for you to craft just about any custom game mode you can imagine. Join our development journey today!"
EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/X4wVWDQ.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/KB6y7WO.png)
