Stormgate's Early Access: 2 Months In

Almost 2 months ago, Frost Giant released their Early Access build of Stormgate - their first, and best, opportunity to impress a community that had tied so many hopes around what Frost Giant called "the next generation Blizzard-style RTS." They had reason to be hopeful, with a veteran team, incredible Steam Next Fest numbers, and the highest-earning gaming Kickstarter of 2023.

What they received, however, was vitriol, criticism, diminishing player counts week over week, and a "Mixed" rating on the Steam Store. This was a massive turn from the numbers and hype just 6 months ago, and begs the question: What happened? And how can Frost Giant recover?

(Im)Perfect Timing

From the very beginning, Frost Giant has marketed themselves as the heir of Starcraft and Warcraft's legacy. With a star-studded cast, including Tim Morten, Tim Campbell (of Warcraft III fame), Kevin Dong, and James Anhalt, they clearly had the talent to produce something special as they worked to implement the Blizzard RTS model while improving on it's weaknesses. The problem, however, is that there is no multi-national corporation backing them. Frost Giant Studios is not Blizzard. The budget to make this game was never going to be in the hundreds of millions, and while the nearly $40 million raised through Seed/Series A funding, Kickstarter, and StartEngine is a weighty sum, it pales in comparison to what a modern AAA game of this scope would cost.

Publicly, Frost Giant is aware of this, with Cara LaForge, Director of Business Operations, giving an interview where she states that "at some point, we're going to have to go to Early Access and actually make some money on the game." For Frost Giant, that time appears to have come sooner than they would have liked.

Frost Giant was founded in the depths of the pandemic, when US federal interest rates were approaching zero and gaming interest was at an all time high. This was the perfect time to found a gaming company - they had the talent, they had the reputation, and with Venture Capital companies funding any project under the sun, they had an easy route to that first 35 million dollars that kickstarted development.

Unfortunately for Frost Giant, that same environment that gave rise to their company also led to record-breaking inflation - inflation that caused the interest rate to balloon to 5.33%, the highest since 2001. Suddenly these Venture Capital firms that had been spending started to tighten their wallets, and 2023 saw a 75% reduction in gaming funding compared to the previous year. Hopes of additional funding rounds disappeared, and timelines appear to have sped up.

Missed Messages

In the absence of additional funding, it appears Frost Giant went full steam ahead on Early Access, which included a marketing campaign that again sold the game as the next evolution of RTS. Stormgate, as promising as it may be, is not the next generation of RTS, at least not yet. There are so many things to love about the game, but nothing is close to feature complete. The campaign is filled with placeholder assets, performance issues plague 1v1 and Co-Op, and while 3v3 and the map editor are on the horizon, the average player likely won't get their hands on them until the new year.

Even still, Frost Giant chose to market their Early Access launch as the next generation instead of a flawed work in progress that could eventually become something incredible. Instead of a host of players well-informed about the state of development, the hopeful masses started playing Campaign, 1v1, and Co-Op expecting the world, and found a world that was not ready. Frost Giant did very little work to set expectations, expecting to be taken on faith that everything would turn out incredible.

Unfortunately, the average gamer is not a game developer. They don't know the different between a placeholder (such as Amara in the campaign videos) and a finalized asset. They can't be expected to. Instead of couching everything with an "unfinished" disclaimer, such as red X's through Amara's soulless cutscene eyes or a granular content tracker, Frost Giant chose to present the game as-is and leave it to players to make their own judgement - to Frost Giant's own detriment. The expectations in no way matched the reality.

This is a shame, because the game has already reached some incredible moments - as have been shown in events like the Stormgate Nexus. PartinG sending Elazer's hopes and dreams to heaven, or Elazer showcasing the promise of lower time to kill in their epic game on Boneyard showcase the promise of Stormgate - if it can only be allowed to reach that promise.

The Road Forward

We now find ourselves 2 months into early access, and instead of this being a glorious start of the next era of RTS games, Frost Giant still languishes on mixed reviews and a diminishing concurrent player count. What lessons can Frost Giant learn from this painful Early Access launch?

To my eye, there are two obvious ones. The first is to set better expectations. When you set expectations correctly, the massive disappointment in the game that isn't better than Starcraft becomes an appreciation for a game in progress. A weekly tracker updating what is placeholder, what is final waiting polish, what mechanics are missing, etc. would go a long way towards communicating the actual state of things. Build it into the client, with progress bars. Make it impossible to miss. This doesn't fix performance issues or the lack of T3 units, but it reassures players every time they login that progress is being made to fix and improve those issues.

The second is that time is the only solution. Early Access' lackluster launch has placed Frost Giant in a hole of their own making, and that is a hole they will have to dig themselves out of. No single update will make up for the damage the first two weeks of Early Access caused. No single unit or performance pass will bring players back that have given up on the game. It will take consistent, significant, improvement to regain the trust of RTS fans who feel like they've been burned.

Frost Giant does have two big "wow" moments left - their 3v3 reveal and the full 1.0 launch. They seemed to have learned from their mistakes of the last two months, and instead of launching open alpha for 3v3 in the October 0.2.0 content patch, they've decided to keep playtesting under NDA while they continue to improve upon it. Hopefully that means the 3v3 Team Mayhem mode will start to draw players back on this long road to redemption.

That road is long, but it's not impossible to follow. Projects like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky have successfully walked it. Can Frost Giant do the same?