EPTPresumably Tim(s) had plenty of connections in the area they’d been working in for years, I really don’t think not upending their lives and relocating somewhere else was a particularly big contributory factor to the project bombing.
Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 335
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WombaT
Northern Ireland27467 Posts
Presumably Tim(s) had plenty of connections in the area they’d been working in for years, I really don’t think not upending their lives and relocating somewhere else was a particularly big contributory factor to the project bombing. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada18002 Posts
Office Space in Irvine is 4X upstate New York. Salaries are 50% higher or more. 5 years ago I could pay a guy $90K and he could easily carry a mortgage on a 2000 square foot house sitting on 0.5 acres of land. This is not possible where Tim is. So, Tim has money. When you have no money you set up shop in upstate New York. A megacorp like Kaokao that has execs evading $780M in taxes can easily find 5,000 ways to slide Tim some extra cash that is never publicly announced. Morten's company has a checkered history of bullshit statements. They gave their company of value of how much again? get the fuck outta here. "funded to release"... "the tiny Theranos device can do any test with just a drop of blood" same bullshit. Here is a live-action version of what happened on reddit when the employees at FrostGate tried to explain what "funded to release" really meant. "funded to release" ... "who is on first". And let's take a look at upstate new york. a place Tim Morten would go if money were a real issue. Upstate New York's Capital Region has emerged as a growing hub for video game development, anchored by a mix of fast-growing independent co-development studios and major corporate operations + Show Spoiler + • Rushdown Studios (Saratoga Springs): Founded in 2021 by industry veterans (including former leaders from PUBG and League of Legends), Rushdown has scaled rapidly to over 30 employees, focusing on multiplayer server architecture, backend matchmaking, and co-development. They opened their first physical downtown office space at 19 Railroad Place. • Velan Studios (Troy): Founded in 2016 by Vicarious Visions co-founders Guha and Karthik Bala at 5 3rd St., Velan continues to expand its independent footprint. Known for titles like Knockout City, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, and Midnight Murder Club, they also maintain an active pipeline partnering with Nintendo and major publishers. • Blizzard Albany (Albany): Formerly known as the longtime Upstate staple Vicarious Visions, the studio was integrated into Blizzard Entertainment. Located in the Albany area, it operates as a major development powerhouse dedicated to Blizzard franchises like Diablo and World of Warcraft. another good thing about upstate New York is that you can draw talent from Montreal. Setting up shop in Irvine, California was a really dumb move. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1240 Posts
On October 27 2026 06:41 JimmyJRaynor wrote: A megacorp like Kaokao that has execs evading $780M in taxes can easily find 5,000 ways to slide Tim some extra cash that is never publicly announced. This is a ludicrous suggestion. Kakao Games is a games publisher, not a charity. They have 5,000 reasons to not "slide Tim some extra cash". What would be the point of doing so? They gave money to Frost Giant the company, because they were investors, and because they signed a deal to be the exclusive publisher for Stormgate in Korea. It wouldn't make any sense for Tim to lie to the SEC, back when there used to be a functioning SEC, on his own corporate documents when he was already riding the gravy train. Also, why would it make sense for Tim to receive extra money and not brag about it? Tim's entire fundraising strategy was to brag about how much money he'd already received from investors! Morten's company has a checkered history of bullshit statements. They gave their company of value of how much again? get the fuck outta here. They gave their company a valuation of $150 million, which does sound crazy of course, but technically it was not a bullshit statement. Private companies can issue shares and set any arbitrary price for said shares. People can choose whether or not to purchase shares. Typically, in investment phases, an investor will receive a small percentage of a company (say 5%) for a set amount of money, and then the company is allowed to extrapolate by multiplying this investment by 20x (since 100% is 20 times 5%) to come up with their "valuation". Investors gave $40 million to Frost Giant to develop Stormgate. We don't know the percentage of stock that they received (although if I cared enough I could probably wade into Frost Giant's various financial statements to check) but if it was around 25 percent or so, that would match Frost Giant's own valuation, as ridiculous as it sounds today. What was more bullshit was calling Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty their "prior game". That one skirted the boundaries between truth and outright lying. "funded to release"... This statement is harder to defend, but it was also technically true, if you consider Early Access to be "release". Obviously most people don't, and therein lay the problem. "the tiny Theranos device can do any test with just a drop of blood" same bullshit. Not really. Theranos' devices never worked. They never even came close to working. The very idea of the devices was impossible, and Elizabeth Holmes lied about them from Day 1, hoping in vain that if she just yelled at her engineers for long enough, they could make the impossible possible. When they couldn't, she just lied more. In contrast, Frost Giant did, technically, deliver a Real-Time Strategy Game inspired by both Starcraft and Warcraft. It sucked and was terrible in every single way, but they did actually produce a game. There are different levels of deception and fraud. If we use what I'm calling the Theranos scale, where 1 is, say, CostCo, and 10 is Theranos, then maybe Frost Giant was about a 3 or a 4. I really wanted to give them an 8, so I could say that Frost Giant delivered an 8/10 game, but I thought better of it.   On October 27 2026 05:41 WombaT wrote: Morten’s company wasn’t exactly broke to start with as if they were good at anything it was fundraising, although they obviously ran into issues with profligacy and general investment in that industry drying up. Presumably Tim(s) had plenty of connections in the area they’d been working in for years, I really don’t think not upending their lives and relocating somewhere else was a particularly big contributory factor to the project bombing. I agree, this is an easy thing to say after the fact, but it wouldn't have helped Tim one bit to move his headquarters somewhere else. Even with a lower burn rate, they still would have produced a shitty, terrible game. They just would have had slightly longer to work on it before the money ran out. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland27467 Posts
On October 27 2026 11:08 Jeremy Reimer wrote: This is a ludicrous suggestion. Kakao Games is a games publisher, not a charity. They have 5,000 reasons to not "slide Tim some extra cash". What would be the point of doing so? They gave money to Frost Giant the company, because they were investors, and because they signed a deal to be the exclusive publisher for Stormgate in Korea. It wouldn't make any sense for Tim to lie to the SEC, back when there used to be a functioning SEC, on his own corporate documents when he was already riding the gravy train. Also, why would it make sense for Tim to receive extra money and not brag about it? Tim's entire fundraising strategy was to brag about how much money he'd already received from investors! They gave their company a valuation of $150 million, which does sound crazy of course, but technically it was not a bullshit statement. Private companies can issue shares and set any arbitrary price for said shares. People can choose whether or not to purchase shares. Typically, in investment phases, an investor will receive a small percentage of a company (say 5%) for a set amount of money, and then the company is allowed to extrapolate by multiplying this investment by 20x (since 100% is 20 times 5%) to come up with their "valuation". Investors gave $40 million to Frost Giant to develop Stormgate. We don't know the percentage of stock that they received (although if I cared enough I could probably wade into Frost Giant's various financial statements to check) but if it was around 25 percent or so, that would match Frost Giant's own valuation, as ridiculous as it sounds today. What was more bullshit was calling Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty their "prior game". That one skirted the boundaries between truth and outright lying. This statement is harder to defend, but it was also technically true, if you consider Early Access to be "release". Obviously most people don't, and therein lay the problem. Not really. Theranos' devices never worked. They never even came close to working. The very idea of the devices was impossible, and Elizabeth Holmes lied about them from Day 1, hoping in vain that if she just yelled at her engineers for long enough, they could make the impossible possible. When they couldn't, she just lied more. In contrast, Frost Giant did, technically, deliver a Real-Time Strategy Game inspired by both Starcraft and Warcraft. It sucked and was terrible in every single way, but they did actually produce a game. There are different levels of deception and fraud. If we use what I'm calling the Theranos scale, where 1 is, say, CostCo, and 10 is Theranos, then maybe Frost Giant was about a 3 or a 4. I really wanted to give them an 8, so I could say that Frost Giant delivered an 8/10 game, but I thought better of it. I agree, this is an easy thing to say after the fact, but it wouldn't have helped Tim one bit to move his headquarters somewhere else. Even with a lower burn rate, they still would have produced a shitty, terrible game. They just would have had slightly longer to work on it before the money ran out. Yeah pretty much 100% agree with all of that | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey464 Posts
On October 27 2026 02:51 Jeremy Reimer wrote: We don't have to guess at this. We know that Frost Giant was founded in 2020, and that both the Tims took $250,000 annual salary. Tim Morten did not take a salary in 2024 and 2025 and he also gave the company a $500,000 loan in 2025, so that Frost Giant could keep going. Therefore, Tim Morten earned a total of $500,000 between 2020 and 2025, an average of $83,333 per year. This is close to the figure of "$75,000 per year" that he mentioned once on a LinkedIn post. So, no, Tim Morten did not "lose money on this endeavour". I thought they also took out a loan. If he is liable to pay that debt, then he would have lost money. But in any case, it is clear that he would have made more money in these last 6 years if he just stayed at an AAA company as a senior employee. So it is not like this was a devious get rich quick scheme. If it was, it backfired, so at the very least it wasn't "smart" as claimed. | ||
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townhouse
United States42 Posts
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