“Frost Giant overhyped and underdelivered” with Stormgate, CEO admits

In a series of LinkedIn posts, Frost Giant co-founder and CEO Tim Morten has been reflecting on the development, launch, and commercial failure of his studio’s RTS game, Stormgate, over the past couple of weeks. He admitted that the company “overhyped and underdelivered” in a post detailing what he might do differently, if he had to launch the game again.

Morten took responsibility for the “undercooked” release and wrote that he should have limited the game’s ambitious scope from the start, focusing on a single-player campaign as well as the standard 1v1 multiplayer mode before expanding into co-op and other areas.

Stormgate sought to challenge Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft 2 for the throne of competitive RTS, but ultimately fell far short of this target following a disappointing Early Access launch — the fate shared by all would-be successors to SC2 so far.

Morten didn’t sugarcoat what happened in another post: “Stormgate's exit from Early Access was spectacularly unsuccessful. After our previous undercooked EA launch, I knew that player interest had decreased, but I believed with hard work we could recover — and the team put in a lot of hard work. The magnitude of Stormgate's commercial failure blindsided me.”

With Stormgate having flopped commercially, Frost Giant is in a difficult position as a studio. For Morten, the ultimate goal is clear. “A new game would provide a meaningful future. Financing new games takes time, and the outcome is never certain. I remain hopeful, but also cognizant of the challenges,” he wrote in the latest post on the topic.

In the meantime, the company hopes to strike some engine licensing deals, which would allow other developers to use its SnowPlay Engine while bringing in needed funds. SnowPlay has previously been described as a modified version of Unreal Engine 5 that’s been optimized for networked games with lots of units on the field — an area the standard engine has notoriously been struggling with, making Frost Giant’s solution an attractive one for this niche.

Frost Giant isn’t the only studio founded by former Blizzard employees that has to contend with low sales: Mike Morhaime’s Dreamhaven recently had to lay off staff to cut costs.

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