Frost Giant Studios’ Stormgate is a real-time strategy game set in a new sci-fi, fantasy universe. The studio was founded by former Blizzard development leaders Timothy Morton and Timothy Campbell. These veteran game developers helped create some of the most acclaimed entries within the RTS class including Red Alert 2, WarCraft III and StarCraft II. With Stormgate, Frost Giant Studios aims to usher in the next generation of RTS games while creating a social experience that brings in gamers unfamiliar with the genre.
Stormgate kick’s off last leg of testing phases with a Kickstarter campaign before early-access.
Within 15 minutes, Stormgate‘s Kickstarter movement became the most popular campaign on the crowd-funding site. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding model was not the only incentive for players to pledge. The lowest pledge amount to receive a signed Collector’s Edition of Stormgate was $350 which sold out within hours of going live. Despite Stormgate already being fully-funded for release, the post-apocalyptic, sci-fi-fantasy raised 700% of their goal in 12 hours and counting.
The Road to Early-Access 2024
Before Frost Giant’s partnership with Hathora, a serverless cloud platform for multi-players, Hathora raised $7.6 million in start-up funds back in March. As one of Hathora’s earliest customers, Frost Giant agreed to let Hathora use their game as a medium to orchestrate large scale load testing. In October, Stormgate was able to stress test a theoretical 1 million concurrent player-count with their technology. With Frost Giant’s goal of releasing Stormgate into early-access in 2024, the partnership furnishes Stormgate with the backend and infrastructure capable of handling an influx of players eager to play the game. Rather than dealing with any management or scaling of the framework, Frost Giant can focus that extra measure into on-going development of the game.
Frost Giant is an independent studio with no publisher support at this time. Stormgate boasts an assembly of RTS game developers who’ve previously worked on the biggest franchises in the genre. In addition, Frost Giant Studios also carries custom technology built specifically for Stormgate. All things considered, the game is still free-to-play. The game plans to monetize with cosmetic customizations and solo/co-op content.
Stormgate‘s Kickstarter campaign runs until January 31st, 2024.
Source: www.playstormgate.com, www.kickstarter.com
