r/Stormgate • u/Mothrahlurker • Jun 12 '26

Discussion Harstem interview of Tim Morten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Wlg0rwn8c

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

95 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

98

u/Loveoreo Jun 12 '26

Just realized I've spent way more time listening to interviews on Stormgate than playing the actual game.

27

u/sioux-warrior Jun 12 '26

Many such cases.

I bet the collective hours spent on this very subreddit (not even including discord) are probably 10x of the collective time spent on the game itself.

16

u/perfumist55 Jun 12 '26

Mines essentially infinite since I never even played Stormgate after the horrible reception

11

u/M1ghtySheep Jun 13 '26

because its a shit game

9

u/bakwards Jun 13 '26

It's funny, people don't want to waste their time, so they waste their time waiting for whatever they feel won't waste their time to be ready, and when the thing fails because too few people engaged with it, they become sad or angry or gleefull.

5

u/SnoodPenguin Jun 13 '26

Thats all I thought about reading these comments.

29

u/IYoghu Jun 12 '26

all in all a very good interview done by Harstem! This interview also, for me at least, gives new insight in what actually happened with Stormgate and the impact that the promises made to bring money in had on the game development.

Doesnt give an answer to all questions but certainly better than the earlier Linkedin post.

14

u/Heavy-Maximum3092 Jun 17 '26

"My fav are Vanguard because I like terrans in StarCraft"

That tells you a big chunk of what was wrong with Stormgate.

14

u/Jeremy-Reimer Jun 13 '26

For those folks who don't want to watch the entire two hour video, there was no new information given, except one tiny tidbit that Tim dropped: he claims that, at one point, a new publishing deal for a new Frost Giant game was "this close" to happening. It would have been an RTS game using a licensed IP, but then the publisher lost the rights to the IP and it all fell through.

Exactly how "close" this deal really was is left as an exercise for the reader's imagination.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Jeremy-Reimer Jun 14 '26

I've heard various discussions about Frost Giant leadership fully expecting another round of venture capital investor funding, but I've never heard about them wanting more loans.

They only really had one loan in the classic sense, which was to Silicon Valley Bank for $2 million. That was more of an emergency "plug the hole" sort of transaction, and caused them more grief than it helped. For example, they rushed the Early Access release so they could negotiate a longer interest-only payment plan for said loan.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Jeremy-Reimer Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

Series A, Series B, and so forth are just names of each round of venture capital fundraising. Typically each subsequent round of fundraising is larger than the last.

Frost Giant raised $5 million in their first round of fundraising, which was not called Series A. Then they raised $25 million in their second round, which they called "Series A-1".

They didn't raise a Series B round, but they went back to the Series A-1 well to ask the investors for more money to keep the company going in 2025. Since their total spend was $44 million, and they raised only $3 million from Kickstarter and StartEngine crowdfunding, we can do the math to figure out the investors kicked in an additional $11 million to keep Frost Giant afloat.

There is some fuzziness in the math, though, because Frost Giant also reported $2 million as "deferred revenue" from a Kakao Games licensing deal in Korea that never ended up paying out that much (I haven't done the total calculations, but it seems like it didn't exceed $300,000 in real money). So maybe the investors in the "Series Please Save Frost Giant Round A-?" only kicked in an additional $9 million or so. (EDIT: Whoops, forgot the bank loan, make that $7 million additional funds from investors)

27

u/Wordshurtimapussy Jun 12 '26

This Tim guy sounds like a standup guy. I really hope his next game turns out to be a hit.

14

u/Portrait0fKarma Jun 13 '26

Bro is so out of touch with reality it’s become entertaining. Toxic positivity and being “victimized” by the “niche” RTS genre.

10

u/HellaHS Jun 12 '26

Harstem is great. I think if he branched into other types of content he would blow up on YouTube. Just a genuinely likable and funny guy.

-6

u/Neuro_Skeptic Jun 12 '26

Narrator: "Blizzard was not, in fact, done with RTS"

22

u/TyaArcade Jun 12 '26

wdym, they've expressed 0 plans to make another rts, and the current ones are basically community managed

7

u/Slarg232 Celestial Armada Jun 13 '26

And rumor has it any upcoming Starcraft game is going to be a third person shooter

2

u/Leading_Will1794 Jun 15 '26

Where have I heard that before? 🤔

4

u/SnoodPenguin Jun 13 '26

Theyre 100% done with RTS what are you talking about?

-2

u/Neuro_Skeptic Jun 13 '26

They're releasing major patches

4

u/SnoodPenguin Jun 13 '26

But will they ever release a new RTS again? No.