Most of the news coming out of Frost Giant in recent months deals with how Stormgate will play - an visit from Neuro here, some "leaked" concept art there, but news breaking today gives us exciting insight into how Frost Giant expects to serve their game to our waiting PCs, as a Hathora funding announcement includes news that Frost Giant has committed to using their infrastructure.
Background
For much of gaming history, if you wanted to deploy a multiplayer game, there were two options: provide some small number of regional servers (US East/Central/West, etc.) or provide some method for users to connect in some Peer-to-Peer method. The former is expensive and leads to sub-optimal ping distributions, and the only saves some costs while being much more vulnerable to various cheats and hacks. Almost all modern competitive games use the centralized server model as a result.
However, there has been a bit of a paradigm shift recently. The advent of solutions like Microsoft Cloud Azure (Age of Empires IV's hosting solution) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has allowed some games to move towards a distributed server model. AOE IV is the prime modern RTS example of this - instead of haivng players connect to some central server (say, US Central), they connect to whichever Cloud Azure server is roughly equidistant between the two of them. This means that a game played between players in Kansas and Poland don't default to a US East server (giving the Kansas player some ping advantage) but instead a server in Greenland or somewhere that is truly ping-equidistant. This doesn't solve the ping problem in it's entirety, but it does ensure almost all games played are "fair."
Hathora
On March 26, Hathora announced a $7.6 million seed funding round including angel investors from Blizzard Entertainment, Probably Monsters (publishers of an upcoming AAA Playstation multiplayer title), Founder's Fund (SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Cloud9), and others. It's a heady group, to say the least.
Hathora offers a "serverless" model for games they serve. This means that, instead of the traditional big server model, they spin up processing time at whicher server is the most optimal for a given two players. This generally provides a much cheaper solution for game developers when compared to the traditional server bank model. With this setup, Frost Giant will not have to purchase their own servers to scale with users - it all gets scaled with use. Hathora says that they are currently active in 10 regions, but plans to expand as they scale.
Impact
This partnership between Frost Giant and Hathora should greatly simplify Frost Giant's server development process and help them get close to something that approaches geographically minimal ping - which increases the impact of the latency games from the rollback netcode announced this weekend. Bottom line: the outlook on Stormgate's networking performance gets even better.
Getting Involved
As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!