I think most people know who this guy is, but for those who don't , he's an extremely well-respected games journalist. The kind who does ACTUAL journalism. Even wrote a book about Blizzard. I think he had at least a slight personal interest in Stormgate, as he's written about it a couple times in the past.

While he doesn't discuss Stormgate specifically, I think you'll find the video's still very relevant. What happened with Stormgate and Frost Giant is part of a wider trend of many studios started by big-name developers going on to fail. (Highguard probably being the most high-profile of these)

He goes over several topics, so you should watch the video, but one the one I found most interesting is the weird paradox of how being extremely well-funded (by indie standards) can ironically be a detriment, as it not only leads to complacency, but can alternatively lead to lots of pressure and expectations that can't be matched. But in Stormgate's case, every reason he goes over in the video is applicable.

Inspired by games like Starcraft, CnC, Stormgate, warcraft.

Insect Empires is a RTS game with 4 factions and 4 different base building gameplay styles I developed over the cost of 4 or more years and I would love for you guys to come try it out! I plan to release next month!

Consider joining us and helping to shape this into something even better!

Steam- https://store.steampowered.com/app/3231600/Insect_Empires/

I know it's fairly unpopular here because a lot of people say that what makes a game live is casual players, the campaign and stuff

And I've seen a LOT of people here say that they should have focused on releasing a good campaign on launch and do less work on the other aspects of the game

But I genuinely think launching a campaign altogether was a huge mistake

The game was obviously not sufficiently developped to make a campaign out of it :

The graphics were terrible, art direction despised by almost everyone and it made for a half baked, rushed campaign with graphics of 2008, litteraly, disproportionnate 3D bodies, cartoonish but in a bad way, design, everything looked so amateur and we were really asking ourselves where the 35 millions USD$ went

It gave a very bad image to the game at the most crucial moment, and on top of that it released with a very limited 1 race only 1v1, so only mirror match ups for a while

In 1 month the game dropped from 5k players to hundreds

I think the campaign was NOT the focus they should have had, having a fun 1v1 AND team game/Coop from the start seemed way more important to retain the player base and not give a terrible look to the game

And then developp the campaign later when the graphics could have been revisited, etc.

Let's be honest : The game was probably dead either way, you can't release an alpha in such a terrible state with such despised by everyone graphics and hope to retain the player base, too much work needed to be done for it to look good.

But it seemed like a more realistic way to go considering the state of the V1 playable state of the game

What do you think ?

I am aware of some other games that got revived by their community and operated their own servers and launchers.

I read around here and it seems that open sourcing the game is not an option.

1. How good are current modding tools and can they allow fix major issues of the game?
2. Do you think there is community interest enough for this to be worthwhile?
3. Open source is not an option, are there other things the Giant Studios can do to assist in giving more control to the community?

It seems there are just too many things wrong in this game and I am not sure if the base framework is something worth building upon.

I just wished we had cool and new RTS games and the death of Command & Conquer still lingers when the genre have so little being produced for all these years.
Giant studios seems to give up on the game and wants to sell the engine. I wish there are things that can be scavenged from all of this.

EDIT: Thanks guys. It appears I was on too much copium regarding this game. The RTS genre really feels stagnate for too long.

Did you see the trailer? The unit pathing and collision instantly had that classic Stormgate slop vibe.

Found this post while browsing the Steam user reviews for the RTS game called Liquidation. Have you guys played it already? If yes, would you agree with this dude?

It went pretty well. Minimum viable product and scrapping the company for parts, the MO of every PE company. All goals achieved.

I remember laughing with my buddy the night we saw that. We were picturing a random crowd of civilian npcs in one mission where they all had backer names 😂😂😂😂

Not looking to discuss the player base or anything related, but afaik, Stormgate was the first RTS to have rollback netcode. It was very exciting to me when announced, especially as as brood war player who knows how brutal it is to play with people on the opposite side of the world with naive netcode.

For those who played, especially with opponents around the world, how did the netcode feel? Would you consider the technology to have been a success?

I just received this email from FrostGiant. I didn’t know that they were collaborating with ZeroSpace now.

Today I got the itch to go back and play the campaign. I download it only to find out campaign mission pack 1 and 2 have been deleted! I’m not gonna fork over 25 more dollars just to play it WHEN I ALREADY BOUGHT IT! I’m not mad I’m just disappointed.

In case someone still cares. Got beaten to the voidlegacy interview jokes unfortunately by the comment section :(

With the epic failure or scamgate… FG actually sending emails around for ZS is killing any anticipation I had for that game now as FG is just a quick money grab failure of a company and other developers shouldn’t be associating with them due to their lack of credibility.

https://reddit.com/link/1twfwd8/video/rc8ab9cmr75h1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1twfwd8/video/iplgdlmmr75h1/player

Made a ton of other pics for it back then too... Sad. Multi still doesn't work, right?

https://youtu.be/nHE6-XpUd74?si=LGY-KjOphYaEjkfS

So, does everyone here prefer 40K instead of SG?

I’ve been wondering if we ever got (or are likely to get) any serious post-mortem insight about what happened with Stormgate after the game’s collapse.

I remember BeoMulf mentioning at some point that, if the project failed, he’d be very interested in doing “post-mortem” style interviews with people involved at Frost Giant Studios.

Have there been any interviews, podcasts, articles, streams, insider discussions, or even community analyses? Any candid reflections from developers, former employees, tournament organizers, content creators, or high-level players who were close to the scene?

Not gonna lie, I'm looking for a bit of drama. But mostly I'm interested in understanding what happened and how it happened.

If you have links/recommendations, I’d appreciate them.

What are people moving on to now? Other than Zerospace I've been following DOW4 and playing DOW1 definitive

Do you think that Stormgate would have done better if Frost Giant completely changed the art as soon as they started getting bad feedback?

What if they had fixed PvP balance on day 1?

Could Stormgate have ever succeeded?

Since the game is kind of over, I figured we can take a quick trip back in time and share our first memories of this epic journey! 😃

Mine started after the (in)famous Blizzard is dead video
I never knew of this (Designer Dave/David Fried) guy before, browsed through his youtube channel, honestly enjoyed the content and ended up in his Discord server.
We were chatting about some random stuff and one day he was like "hey you know, there is a super cool RTS coming out, made by ex blizzard devs. Allegedly he was also doing some level or whatever design work on it, although he was never listed as an employee on the FGS website and his Linkedin profile says he was a design ninja and did "Early design recommendations".
Anyway, that's back in 2022 I guess, he sounded like he is actually doing a major stuff about this new cool game, I figure there where already early screenshots and maybe gameplay videos. I get excited about it, back it up, keep following the progress, but as the days and weeks pass I am starting to find some of the aspects of the game not so.. appealing.
One day I go to him (virtually) and i'm like "hey mate, the game looks promising, but there's this and this and this that is not so cool. I'm just a customer, right, know nothing about game design, but have yall thought about changing it slightly?"
I was talking about visual designs, units, art style this kind of stuff that just didn't feel right.
Long story short- he didnt enjoy being criticized.
Unfortunately I am not keeping the chat, but as far as my memory serves, I believe he went in full defense mode, stating how much experience he and the others have, ex Blizzard employees, The Culling of Stratholme, the lot. Eventually, as we all know, they ended up redesigning a big portion of the game, which made me both happy that I was actually right, but also to wonder if that game will be as good as I hoped.
Then there was the official reveal stream, then the other problems surrounding it, then August 2025 and here we are now, waiting for the RTS return.

Full report here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2013852/000201385226000002/form_car.pdf

Ex developers from a big gaming company and working at a different one does not transition into a good game.

In fact, every ex-blizzard employee has never made or been a part of anything good. This includes David Brevik, who made the best ARPG franchise of all time. He really didn't make anything decent after the Diablo franchise.

HEY! A EX-BLIZZARD EMPLOYEE MAKING A NEW GAME! THIS IS GOING TO BE GREAT!

Don't be that guy.