Inside Stormgate with Tim Morten: In-Depth Live Review & Gameplay with Insights

one of the only remaining competitive RTS on the market but if I want to get more regarding I don't know campaign single player content uh the commanders which are Co based if I understood correctly or some additional Cosmetics through the vesse system that you have on the road map then I will pay something with like onetime purchases and that's it if I get it right that's that's the play yeah pretty much every mode of the game um has an opportunity for players to experience mode without paying anything and so this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry you can't even St always okay go welcome everybody uh thank you very much for coming uh again uh this is two and a half Gamers my name is Mel I'm Felix braberg and I'm we are your host and we have very special special guest because we are we have a very special episode please all all guys all the audience please welcome Team Morton from frost giant Studios welcome team please H thanks for coming can you I mean you're the legend in the industry already so but you know for for the audience that doesn't know you can you uh give us a little bit of introduction about you and the company you founded oh good and uh yeah no hardly Legend just another person

trying to make a good game out here but um yeah I um am currently helping to lead a new company called Frost giant Studios um that is building a new pc real-time strategy game called stormgate uh I've been in the industry about 30 years um gotten to work at places like Activision and Sony and Electronic Arts but most recently at blizzards uh where I was working on Starcraft 2 you know Legend 30 years in the industry 10 yakob 9ish fix 9ish as well so eight yeah combin together we a little close together we are close all that means is that I'm old that's I mean we kind of grew up on on Star to and like all of the all of the

fun around so this is like very like big pleasure to have you on the on the podcast and uh so dear listeners uh we will have few questions and uh we agreed on actually playing with him together so you know if we go sideways like Felix is going to keep us uh in on track and uh and kind of ask questions while we play or we'll see what happens but you know how it is so so we were discussing yob you try to already kind of jump straight in before we start recording so what's up what's where can where should we start with uh with the game and everything or maybe like can you walk us through a little bit like the timeline let's say yeah the timeline let's start with the timeline like what's what's currently being cooked up how Store games doing was the Early Access and was the release dat let's called numbers I guess sure uh yeah I guess a lot to

unpack there so um Frost giant started in 2020 the founding group um came out at blizzard most of us had worked together on Starcraft the game director Tim Campbell had worked on Warcraft 3 and um yeah the goal was to build a new RTS as an independent studio and to try to carry forward that Heritage uh gaml um that is is specific to Blizzard RTS um so it's resource collection it's Base building uh it's creating an army and then it's Fielding that Army um through campaign missions through Cooperative missions and through competitive and um yeah there's some things that are sort of unique to Blizzard RTS like right click and you know just various mechanics that that we're trying to carry forward in this new independent RTS um we spent the first year building

out technology though we are on the Unreal Engine unreal isn't necessarily designed with real-time strategy in mind uh it's a great engine when it comes to pipelines for graphics for example but uh for us we have very high unit counts and those units all need to be Network sync they need to have collision and pathf finding and game logic and so um yeah we spent about a year building out a platform that we call snowplay uh snowplay works with unreal but really it's an independent piece of technology um that uses unreal to take input and to do rendering and and audio and all of the basic kind of engine functionality that unreal brings but Snow Play handles all of the networking all of the game play uh and all of the tooling around that game place so we had to build our

own editor as as a do I do I get the right that is some kind of a custom add on to Unreal something like let's say Mio uses for genin impact where they have like custom version of unity and stuff like that uh we'll be releasing yeah our editor um independently in uh the months ahead really because it's tied to our perforce database and it's got lots of sort of ugly developer user interface right now we're going to do a Polish pass before it does get released but yeah realtime strategy has such a lineage of great editors from even Warcraft 2 Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 uh the mod scene the map scene for those games was so robust and of course spawn the MOBA genre countless Tower Defense and Auto battler games so yeah we're really excited um to the Future point where we get to release our editor for players to take advantage of

themselves yeah to to go to where we are today so we spent that first year building Tech uh we spent the following years than building out the game modes and we started with the simplest which is one versus one because that doesn't require any AI or scripting you can do it with just a single race um and uh so we built that mode first then we built cooperative mode uh which is what we're going to play together today uh that mode it's kind of one step harder and that there is a little bit of logic scripting on the maps and there are some uh AIS that we will battle against in in the mission um and then campaign is what we implemented most recently before Early Access launch and that of course is kind of the Pinnacle of complexity because the type of

involv scripting that requires lots of triggers custom functionality yeah it's just a tremendous amount of work so uh so that's the order we built the game in we did a closed Alpha and some closed betas to get feedback along the way um and we're continuing in that Spirit of doing releases that are intended to get feedback with our Early Access release that went out uh just last week to players who had either supported us through Kickstarter or pre- purchased the game on Steam and next week on August 13th the game will be available for anyone to try um so effectively free to play um with some purchases obviously to help support our continued development so let's let's pause that like what's the then like the difference between the Early Access version and the

free-to-play version which is coming out next week the the version that people are playing right now is um just a purchase only access to the build but really because those two builds are just two weeks apart they're basically the same build we'll do some balance tweaks we'll do some bug fixes from what we learned but um yeah fundamentally the first couple of weeks were just meant to be a preview of access yeah regarding the content what's the difference like afterwards after August 13 with the Early Access people and like completely free to play people that just download the game don't pay anything uh sorry what's the difference in the content you're asking yeah yeah yeah no it's uh so paid players just got a preview of what the Early Access players are going to play but it's it's the same game you know so no difference in content okay yeah we we'll make some balance make we are just earlier than everybody else basically the prev okay

uh do we want to stay here a little bit uh regarding the business model of free toplay if you're releasing freeo play next week talk about that yeah so I guess this comes a little bit more um unorthodox for the PC Community where because I wouldn't really say that as I looked into the game and as I read some of your road map that this is the typical free-to-play model as we know from like mobile game industry or you know the games that are like crossplatform with like the big mobile games that go PC Mobile even cons and so on so forth where you would have some like power progressions or even like League of Legends progressions where it's like pure cosmetic economy or stuff like that so you have I would say a little bit of a hybrid model that's mainly eand to taking pointers from Starcraft 2 business model yeah many of the members of this team were involved in the 2017 release of Starcraft to that was well received by the community really the goal was is to take

the content uh as it existed and make it available alart to new players who are coming in so we really wanted to avoid putting any kind of gotcha mechanics any kind of grind mean gotta gotta clap I brought the t-shirt that exactly and uh we really wanted to avoid anything that was pay to win um I think the PC audience is is very sensitive understandably to all of those things and so part of the motivation in going for to play really was to increase player counts it's not like we were trying to fundamentally change um the way that the game monetizes it's selling the same stuff that it always sold missions and heroes and War chests um but instead of having to pay a full retail price to get in players are able

to give the game a try and decide what type of content they want to attach to so really it was conceived to try to be as consumer friendly as possible it's kind of funnel funnel play wi the funnel at the beginning okay but but the thing is if I understood correctly so if I'm a let's say competitive player and I downlo storm get free to play next week I can pretty much get all the features that are let's say covering the competitiveness of the game and I just jump into the Ladder ranking and pretty much get my usual kind of dose of one of the only remaining competitive RTS on the market but if I want to get more regarding I don't know campaign single player content uh the commanders which are Co-op based if I understood correctly or some additional Cosmetics through the wesse system that you have on the road map then I will pay something with like onetime purchases and that's it if I get it right that's that's the play yeah pretty much every

mode of the game um has an opportunity for players to experience that mode without paying any and so for campaign the first three missions are free uh for Co-Op all of the commanders can be played up to level five for free and there's one Commander that's fully unlocked that even free players can fully level uh and then as you pointed out for competitive one versus one uh yeah players and just jump in and play and um yeah there's an opportunity for players to enjoy campaign to buy more campaigns for players who enjoy Cooperative to buy more Heroes and for players who enjoy competitive to purchase Cosmetics those are sort of the three pillars of how stormgate plans to make money and and those are the same three pillars that Starcraft who had as well yeah like for like correct me if I wrong but there's not really that much difference between Starcraft like freet

to-play model that they switched 2017 and basically what you said yep you got it and I think um you know we're adding some new types of Cosmetics um and obviously our game modes um are a bit different in that campaign will uh eventually support playing with friends with uh up to three players in campaign Maps uh Cooperative also supports three players and competitive uh eventually we plan to release a three versus three competitive mode and that mode will also support Heroes uh so those Heroes that are currently only relatively useful for the Cooperative mode will be relevant to the competitive modes when 3D it's very interesting because mostly when I look around regarding PC freet to-play games um if we have like let's say if you exclude out of the equation stuff like I don't know fortnite of League of Legends which is like giant cosmetic economies on

giant daus which is I guess this won't be the case because it's just kind of very hardcore community that really plays RTS games these days uh but yeah there are still Niche games that like like monetizing very well so if you for instance take like Warframe or P of Exile which are again very successful free toplay PC games but they have their own kind of a way for instance I always call P of Exile to be like pay for Comfort because you literally pay for bigger inventories there or some kind of quality of life features which doesn't give you any power Advantage but again they are kind of very good in a way to have them have you ever thought about something in this manner or just like as you said pretty much what Starcraft did because you know that the model worked before and like this is it yeah I think the thing that we like about this aircraft model is that it really tries to avoid introducing frustration that you then ask players to pay to get rid of um like our our hope

is more to show players stuff that they like and then give them an opportunity to buy more we felt like that feels better just sort of philosophically that was our goal like that's like yeah completely okay my book I'm just kind of a little bit maybe worried if it will be enough or like if it isn't kind of too friendly because that that would be immediately like one of my other questions if if you it's always a question um you know I think it it did work for Starcraft but obviously Starcraft um had the benefit of being uh a blizzard product with a a brand basically and a sequel on top of that um the other thing about Starcraft was that by 2017 the game had been out for seven years uh so it had the benefit of yeah you know growing that audience space so yeah it's definitely an experiment for stormgate and um but you know it's one that we're hopeful for I think building games in a way that um

takes away upfront price as a barrier to entry feels like it has the potential to expand audience um I think with StarCraft one of the reasons we even went free to play was that we discovered even though Starcraft had some free trial capabilities built in that most people perceived it to be a full retail price game and didn't even realize that there was a way to go try for free so by being free to play I think people understand that they have that ability yeah we'll see August 13th is uh we get to test our hypothesis sure sure like one of my other big questions because like ially spend like a lot of my childhood on um the European battle net of Warcraft all these modes and to be honest like none of us here are like very good like competitive RTS players with like I don't know 160 APS which I never hate in my life but the modes

there were amazing as you said like they were pretty much like the breeding ground for all the big genres that come out of it and I remember fondly playing all like even like these Niche games like who's the killer fight of characters whatever this whatever that like every week it was some kind of other all the Tower Defense all the to defenses were talking about the tower defense and I just got goosebumps immediately exactly we played all of these things so is this is this kind of like if I understand correctly this is this will be done like the part of completely free free experience that if like editor releases later down in your own map and people start making these games and then pretty much it will be the same as me not joining like a competitive game but joining a custom map on the server server Shard of the game and then basically it is that yeah you got it um so our goal with the editor is to be every bit as powerful as Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 and to provide much more content creator

friendly terms than I think some of the big companies have provided like philosophic as as like uh if I if I understood correctly currently where work reforge was launched the editor is now pretty much done in a way that everything that's created in it is pretty much owned by blizzard so no more do spring out of it and blizzard not getting any money on right yeah yeah that's my understanding as well and and we want to be a lot more friendly than that I think for us um you know the editor is uh a way to build community and yeah even with Warcraft 3 like so many of those maps that did become successful uh went off and got rebuilt as their own games anyway like that's gonna happen if somebody makes a good game and it should like it's their idea they built it they they should be able to do that um so philosophically we really um you know we're game creators ourselves many of us uh also came from the modern Community like Ryan shooter

and Austin Hudson like there there are team members who work in games today kind of editors that shipped with games um so we really want to continue to support that in a very authentic because like for me I don't know what you know you know probably better the percentages or how it was back then but my guess is that if we take let's say hypothetically this I don't know year forward and we have this functionality already running up with like the servers of the game scolling with like all these stub defenses and other custom modes my guess is that the competitive Community wouldn't be bigger than this kind of community or like for me it was always like just much more people playing these games than just like raw competitive Lea in in my view I don't know I just got this feeling yeah it varies by Era I guess you know if you look back at the Warcraft 3 days as DOTA started to take off um

DOTA even just the DOTA mods um in places like China really spread like wildfire um and so you know still today there is a huge population playing original DOTA uh yeah the original one from marcraft battl net marcraft 3 and so um yeah that that potential absolutely exists I think what we saw in terms of game modes with start to um was that the Cooperative mode inclip the popularity of competitive mode and I think it is kind of similar thought process to what you described that as much fun as competitive is there are a number of us who feel overwhelmed unable to keep up with the uh the top players and so it's just a more enjoyable experience for some of us to go play co-op map or a map that is a little less intimidated and um yeah certainly with Legacy the

void um we were surprised by what a large percentage of players participated in Co-op and definitely uh put a lot of effort into the co-op for storm gate to try to carry that forward yeah like because for me like it would be a no-brainer honestly like I like I I don't think so that I hit like 15% of of all my playtime Warcraft and Starcraft that I was in competitive I would like I try to do it and like learn some like build orders and stuff like that but at the end of the day like I would rather go play I don't know Tower Defense with friends or whatever something because I just like maybe never go that competitive friends anyway I don't know but back to the topic here like how do you plan then to support the single player content because if I guess uh the overall road map as I've seen it uh especially in 2025 there's a few more missions being geted or like should we

imagine that by the let's say Finish Line the campaign would be something on the same level as Starcraft 2 or Warcraft 3 in his robustness yeah I'm really excited about U this kind of ongoing delivery approach to campaign um I think at the very beginning where uh we're just starting out you know we're kind of getting our legs under us for for building campaign and uh I think there's a lot of improvement coming even to the missions that we've already launched to kind of level up their production values but over time as we continue to add new missions it gives us the ability to tell a story that doesn't have to stop for two years in between releases like it did between wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm and then part of the starm and Legacy of the Void we can just keep that story going with new campaign drops every quarter and uh you know in later

years we'll take a break in Q4 for the holidays and pick things back up in q1 but this year um you know we're planning to just continue producing more and more campaign content to really lay that foundation for the story and I think you know as an early access game all across the board there are rough edges um you know it's brand new balance for multiplayer um I think Co-op the map leveling is a little uneven and we're hearing about bugs on this map or that map so there's stuff to fix but campaign especially because by necessity that was the mode that we built most recently um it feels like there's a lot of work to do to really live up to player expectation from the production values perspective and you know it's not surprising given that blizzard had the benefit of all of the massive resources of that cinematics team people need to

understand that like you're not a multi-billion company and they have these expectations man like people won't understand like they did they don't care I mean like you know at the end of the day it's it's on us to make content that people like and and so when we get critical feedback um I think by definition that feedback represents how people feel and we need to listen to it and to pay attention to it and and for sure we can't hit the same you know spectac level that blizzard did but we can do better and um yeah that's that's kind of part of the Early Access process is just um really listening and and figuring out what are the things that we need to level up on and campaign frankly is uh you know one of the areas that we got the strongest feedback on and again I'm not surprised because it by necessity was the thing we worked on most recently but um yeah we're uh very committed to that itative process of making things better so you'll see some

improvements even to the missions that have already launched I went through the campaign like all all all of the missions pretty much I think it's pretty good already like in I already got the artas Vibes out of theory a little bit yeah great character in particular something that we're gonna be putting some work into and more facial animation I think those are all like fair fair that's that's okay like I think people still need to need to understand that pretty much a lot of lot of times in the campaign you're playing with the playing with the wi condition which like completely changes the new functionality like where you have the driller in or there's some other time base setup whatever it's like all custom stuff that you see once and then like a new custom stuff needs to be coded in which is like a lot of work so I guess but it's like people don't understand all of them don't understand like this like of course is but it is but to my other question like I know for instance ped what guys do there like they do these three months leaks with like custom functionality that they you

know do have some progression system with like cosmetic Rewards or whatever something like that like do you have anything similar in mind for like later down the line as a liveable system I mean something that we haven't seen with Starcraft or I don't know similar PC freet toplay games that are as as we said like no power progression based yeah I guess um the the closest thing if if I'm understanding correctly um the closest thing we had in Star crafts was the war chest events that were sort of Engagement events um with progression that unlocks various Cosmetics um and we will do our own version of that um as we get deeper into development on stormgate um but yeah for right now I think the whole team is almost entirely focused on just digesting the feedback that we've gotten Mak adjust like if I understand for those who don't don't read that like for system is some kind of a battle pass

that's mainly tuned towards Esports tournament where proceedings I mean back then in stra it would go proceedings to the tournament and you pretty much buy a map and then you level it up and slowly get the rewards out of it in the battle pass stle system Yeahs sort of yeah it's um they basically um as you accumulate XP by playing the game you unlock Cosmetics um so it wasn't necessarily restricted to one map uh and you could choose to participate just for a specific race in the game or you could choose to participate across multiple races for the unlocks so somewhat similar but yeah just a particular Starcraft variation I guess well talking about tournaments I mean I I saw there's like one or there was one live tournament in in South Korea I was like Wow first of all wow second of all like you you share a little bit more about like what's was that all all about because there was a prize pool like 5,000 and what was like eight

people it was actually really exciting for us to see Pro players play on The Early Access version um it was hosted by tasteless who is one of the most beloved casters from Starcraft 2 uh or casting Duos uh because really it was tastosis artosis and tasteless with some help from a bunch of friends and um yeah this was a chance for the dev team to see what Pros can do and a chance for the pros to see you know where the game is at this stage we actually did our I believe this would be our first uh offline tournament was dream hack Atlanta last year in December uh and that also was a lot of fun it was more a really show match style than uh legitimate tournament style like tasteless is event was um and yeah we

we've got some more stuff coming up on the competitive front uh as well so yeah excited to you know share more details as as more events get closer but um you know I think the competitive side of RTS is uh just incredibly exciting to watch even for a player like me who's not necessarily the best competitive player a much more Co-op guy but Welcome to our world but yeah I just I I really enjoy watching I skill play I mean I was definit one of the most enjoyable ones where Lally like you watch people having this Mastery of being able to like do 160 actions per minute and like it's it's Marvel to watch mind blown immediately it's like like I don't even know what's happening yeah I still uh think back to a particularly embarrassing moment where I

I had to uh you know demo some gameplay for a journalist and a community tournament organizer walked up behind me and said Tim you're really terrible at this game I had to just true I am not the best player but I do love playing well you can we can try yeah we can we can try we can we can try let's let's try ask that question before we get started actually cuz I was just thinking Tim like there's been a lot of releases like what what releases of games have you kept an eye on in the last 6 to 12 months like what are some pitfalls that you've seen on some recent game launches and what are some like pieces of Brilliance uh that you kind of like that you've seen yeah great question um you know I think we've all seen some of the spectacular successes of power world or Hell divers to um manner Lords um like these these are all such great

success stories um you know and shrouded darker like there there's just so much good stuff going on um there are also teams who um you know we're friends with just from being in the industry and sort of all being part of the same ecosystem um who you know have had experiences that weren't breakout successes like that um and I would look at uh paleo with Singularity six um spellcraft with one more game um you know we're watching PX day from Mainframe and I think you know all of these guys um are really great developers and very sincerely poured themselves into building their games um they so many opportunities to not get it exactly

right and um you know such a wide variety of outcomes that happens and so I think all any of us can do is try our best and to uh try to learn both from other people's experiences and from our own and to then just iterate and improve over and over again until we get it right and uh yeah making games I think it's uh so much harder than a lot of people outside the industry realize there so much complexity to what we do um and no matter how many games I've worked on every game is hard it's just the nature of the business yeah especially making successful games big difference there okay okay okay well in that case like how how would you measure success of yeah I would say I felt like we didn't

make players as happy as we wanted to um with our initial release and you know we fully expect being Early Access um you know being more budget constrained than we were at blizzard um that there was going to be stuff that people would have critical feedback about um you know I look at even balers Gate 3 which was you know probably won Every Game of the Year award that it's possible to win uh I looked back just recently at some of the reviews from their Early Access launch and years in spiritual support for them like the actual review scores were not stunning um and that's you know it's kind of nice way how to put it yeah uh but you know clearly those guys are a great team um they took that feedback they stuck to their Vision they iterated they iterated and they released something that's probably gonna go down

as one of the best games of all time and so I find that really inspiring I think the whole team at Frost giant looks to that as an example of you know yeah Early Access is not the final Vision I'm very optimistic about where we can get stormgate yeah that's the like you know welcome to the freet toplay club where it's never too late to iterate this is not a premium game H starts after lunch not before but no this is kind look I am Ah that's okay all right I'll ask question we let's talk about the actual game I mean I mean like what what what's there because I think there's uh yeah yeah a lot of like uh I would say nuances that are there that that I think people out of the RTS genre are not really familiar but I think like it's really upgraded to the to the thing that like I've seen like if I compare my like Warcraft

experience I I read all like the the reviews about like the the art style and everything I mean I think it's absolutely amazing honestly like the game looks perfect like for me this is no thank you I I think um you know everybody has their own visual sensibility and so I I respect the people who are coming from more of a gritty sci-fi sensibility like I love those kinds of games too uh stormgate really does um blend sensibilities from both Warcraft and Starcraft um so you should definitely see some influence um from Warcraft big pons yeah and even Diablo Universe to a certain extent um but it's also really aspiring um to appeal to a broad audience that um includes people who are coming from games outside of RTS and so um you know

if you could say there's some OverWatch influences some League influences even you know fortnite influences I I think all of those things are kind of stirred together certainly coming heavily from a Starcraft Warcraft background as a team so those are are probably the most prominent but yeah that didn't necessarily um align with what everybody wanted to see but we we have to accept that um no matter what choices we make we're not going to make everybody happy we just hope of course like you need to stick to your vision in the first place that's the thing and that that's there the normal way of game development let's always be someone who's Bing about like everything well we we love them all so it still hurts when we you know but any yeah hopefully they'll stick with us and give us a chance to keep making the game better yeah well look we we talked about total

battle which is a Forex game which was alive for seven years and it started scaling and getting like serious revenues after half a million a day yeah half a million a day basically so it's like it's possible it's it's I mean it's not quite normal but it's definitely possible yeah yeah but like to be honest does a mobile game like very specific one which uses very specific funnel and marketing model but I I still think like your journey could be compared to something or let's say I would think so like P of xile where also they can start smallish and very smallish and like I remember I was playing that game like from the beta like for last 15 years so I remember that there was also this kind of a feeling that like yeah it's never as good as Diablo blah blah blah like production values but in the end they can overtook I think even the original with the mechanics because they innovated a lot in the mechanics player kind of genre requirements they

move the genre a lot now they're doing the second one which I think is going to really kick us if it kind of releases later down the line and even though there's still not that kind high production budget like core players only care about the core nobody's going to care about Ms not moving in cinematics in the end so I think like yeah you know you know what to do much better than us no worries I think every you know every game is a learning experience so yeah we're uh trying trying to take as much inspiration as we can from all the feedback that we're getting um so all right I I have no uh particular uh favorite in terms of Heroes but I probably am gonna go Vanguard uh for this and uh have any of you guys tried Celestial the new race uh I tried um infernal guys but I can go Celestial whatever feel no

pressure for do do what feels good to you but yeah I think Celestial is probably uh feels the least familiar to players coming in from other games just because its mechanics are bit unique can I even oh yeah this is a good question so how do I even select celestials if I don't have like the heroes sorry how do you select celestial guys I go Orana is there you go okay okay okay yes H see just going to stick this fine I'm do I get it right a little bit the celestial are more like akin to protos and the infernal are a little bit more akin to Zer there oops I clicked ready but you guys uh say celestials are um kind of a unique race the the

fact that their structures are mobile not just in the Starcraft Teran way but in the you know they are generally ships that are hovering over the map means that you don't necessarily have a fixed space location um and so uh anyhow yeah just the Dynamics of the race it's it's a pretty new experience so if you haven't tried them before there's a little bit of a learning curve there yeah let's see I'm like I'm okay like I already I already tried infernals and like it was super interesting that like it's literally summoning there's no like build unit cool Downs is literally if if there's charged you can build them right now that's it we were playing yesterday and there there was the the third guy but yeah we can go who who starts the game or do we all select ready or just all select ready and should be should be good I'm I'm ready team is ready but perfect in the meantime so the thing is

the kickstarter and Indiegogo stuff which was really surprising to be honest like for a lot of people uh so what was the kind of uh idea behind it because it felt like something you have planned and then it kind of exploded because the goal of 100,000 uh was what like reaching like 15 minutes yeah that was uh definitely here I'm gonna try to multitask and talk as I play but now I have an excuse if I do terribly same here so I think the uh the thing that led us to Kickstarter in the first place is that as an early access game um typically doing pre-sales on steam uh isn't available to us and even

beyond that um we really wanted to get physical collector additions out there uh and come up with a pathway for getting more people into the Beta And so uh between all three of those considerations it really um just made sense for us to look as a Kickstarter because that is a channel that steam uh supports and uh even seems to encourage so um yeah we put a lot of work into trying to structure it in a way that we hoped would feel good to players and we also uh then came up with a partnership to help us create these physical collectors editions that include a Vulcan statue yeah

okay because I was I was looking at the the numbers and you you got like what like two million plus for that for that campaign from from the players that's amazing yeah we were so grateful for the outpouring of support um that came from players and um you know I think we only switched to indigogo at the end because we kept getting requests uh to participate past the point that Kickstarter was uh oops get my guys over here to help my Ally is under attack uh yeah past the point for the kickstarter was able to stay open because I saw I saw like la like later pledge or something like after the the geek start was done yeah so I I was traveling and then I was like oh my God this Kickstarter campaign

looks great and then I came back oh it's too late already and then I was also late for the Indigo was just like terrible but you're currently uh raising money from crowdfunding again right yeah so the crowd Equity round uh on start engine had a different goal um which was to enable us to support uh independent develop uh and Publishing specifically so um you know I think a lot of sorry here before I okay it's okay like now we we actually you know because we are making fun of of yakob all the time like he suck but it's not actually that when he plays and explains the game the same time welcome to my club was kind of our signature move like know I know I know but now we are tasting our own medicine totally yeah

this is where I'm baded uh so yeah I think a a lot of studios here I'm gonna just talk for a second while I build resources um a lot of developers wind up doing publishing deals and uh you know publishing deals mean that another company gets to tell you creatively what to do and another company gets to tell you how to run the business and um you know with a good partner it can work out okay but it really I think laran went on record recently of saying uh how important being independent was to them being able to realize their Vision you know that if somebody else were publishing or somebody else were investing and had control of their company that that would really have changed the equation and so yeah for frost giant for stormgate um we want to stay independent we want to make sure that we have the ability to build the best game that we can build independent from trying to

optimize for profit independent from um somebody else's Creative Vision and so yeah the start engine campaign really was about us being able to maintain that Independence and yeah again just super grateful to the folks who have supported us there maybe if you can explain a little bit more for because just like people did I always think as mostly mobile based and in Mobile if you have a publisher it mostly means that those are the guys that are responsible for running your user acquisition marketing campaigns that's the understanding here but regarding PC do I get the right that they have like direct say in your business model like do you go DLC premium or like freet to play or like the deals are I guess much more integrated to the game product rather than the marketing itself only yeah on PC um the publisher really since they're the one bringing the game game to Market um by definition as publisher uh they get say over all of

that and uh that's not the same for a regional publisher um you know we do have Partners like Kow gam in Korea who are taking what we've built and helping us um bring it to markets specifically in that region but I Global publishing deal generally the publisher gets to dictate um creative and uh from a business model perspective how everything is going to work and it's not that they don't listen to developers they do but oftentimes they will make decisions independence of what a developer wants to do because sometimes like the let's say the interests of the publisher and the developer some sometimes goes the other way around if I get that right yeah yeah and I I think uh even you know well-intentioned um groups still just uh you know don't

have the same vision that we're necessarily gonna have so and for what it's worth I I did work at another startup that was primarily uh publisher funded um you know doing just trying to get up to the front line help here uh uh don't worry Remo's in the back traditional sort of Advance against royalty style development and you know good games still get made that way but it's just a very different kind of um process and I think for stormgate to really be built right U Independence is important to us and that's kind of the thinking then behind the recent campaign on Star engine then or was there any other thinking behind it that's 100% it yeah I

think um we had raised what we needed to raise for development but really uh for publishing that's a whole different set of considerations so like what what's the plan then like uh like marketing yeah yeah marketing then marketing afterwards it yeah uh well thanks to the start engine campaign we've been able to build some relationships with uh groups like petrol um who are an outside advertising agency uh so they're helping us with the promotion stormgate and um yeah we're able to do some tournament events and uh work with twitch to help promote the game so uh yeah publishing on PC it's a little less it's you guys know uh less about just direct paid acquisition way mobile is so

focused on paid UA but um you know awareness marketing and well I I can tell you I'm working with like a few steam uh games now and we're working on let's say on campaigns for like wish listing and it does work it's just a matter of the the campaign kind of structure is the same as mobile but with the different objective so instead of like download in the game the the main objective of the campaign is actually like adding to wish list uh or I worked before uh with some games on Steam and you're just promoting the game when there was a sale and I mean it worked well certain extent it's not as easy to track everything as he's on mobile but yeah it's it's all fun by the way if you are at this topic do you have any like retention benchmarks

or something regarding our favorite kpi numbers that you are targeting or like expecting or just following around yeah we did build uh retention dashboards but I think too uh too soon to extract much data currently because we had sort of less than a week in with a very small uh pre purchase segment versus the so yeah super interested to see how that evolves as get more data yeah because in in like mobile freet to play it's literally like half of the you know it's literally called like data driven design where you have the kpis dictates what needs to be done now and is literally like a broken car where the dashboards tell you okay this is not working well build this feature this is not working currently well build that other feature because the direct impacts I don't know day one day s retention monetization day 20 blah blah

blah stuff like that so do you have something similar in mind or it just more of like just getting into it uh we we do care about retention but at this stage I think the biggest thing that we want to make sure we get right is uh player satisfaction and I think from the point that we uh he's killing some people all is I'm just yeah door you know we'll we'll get to a point that we're more um optimization oriented in terms of looking at data and figuring out what to optimized but right now it's really Community feedback that is the focus of the team and so yeah I look forward to getting to that stage where it's just sort of optimization

instead of pegging the so the the metric that you would be following now would be pretty much like Steam Reviews or wish lists or stuff like that yeah again we look at Steam Reviews we look at uh credit feedback and um you know also steam forums U Discord is probably the single most uh active feedback point for our community right now so all of those provide inputs to uh the decisions that then like with the feedback like what kind of feedback are you I mean yeah looking for it's just looking for I guess you can't just act on like all all comments and then reviews right yeah no we we have a community team that has to help U because we do get such a large volume of feedback but the what kind of feedback I guess the the single biggest

thing I would say there is constructive feedback um you know I think it's valuable to know what people don't like but in constructive feedback where uh it is coming from a place that also gives us suggestions on how to improve rather than just I think the game is bad like that that doesn't actually give us anything to work on but um yeah thankfully you know we've gotten quite a bit of uh construced feedback so far and yeah sure it'll keep accumulating as we go fre yeah you bet it's going to accumulate this you go free F yeah that's the power of freet topl I think that the people if they don't purchase something and then they on something that is free free to play in like its nature it's just different kind

of relationship I think Remo can you comment what you're doing a little bit yeah I'm trying to follow mate and destroy the like the gate here which is like one of the C objectives but I'm failing horribly with my back which means my B base is underdeveloped because you got attacked yeah because I not really because I because I just can do two things just that's that's that's as well yeah but at least I I figured out yesterday it will be respawn which is good like I'm missing some like bendings of the of the keyboard so like I would have been like I don't know on keyboard to all of these yeah that

was one one of the things that we're working on is a more uh flexible uh highkey customization system so that mirroring one of our top requests oops Yeah I guess for this this kind of competitive players it's like must must have fees basically where you can customize stuff [Music] o I mean I just want to control F at least have some some control of these because it's that's what I want Even though yeah the good thing about celestial is that they can even attack it seems that's great it's as well as we

we should until they last yeah yeah whoa I'm yeah I know because as I said oh you're your ass is getting kicked yob this way way way harder than the the game yesterday to be honest yeah I think yester we went begin today we normal this is on normal mode it's probably the difference so yesterday was just easy peasy I think any RTS player would kind of be laughing at what's going to be happening at the screen like season one I mean oh no yeah obvious

yes sadness sadness yeah no worries fa let's go back maybe wrap it up yeah no yeah don't wor you know this SC it's not the last last game we play that's for sure keep this because honestly one of the last questions looking through the future if you can May me talk a little bit about the RO have anything to play on my PC I have it here because it's it's even advertising the game basically yeah what else uh so there's a lot of content coming even this year if I understand correctly yep that's very true so the whole whole team uh doesn't slow down from Early Access launch um we

have quite a bit plans um yeah please do including another Co-op map and some more Heroes I think definitely campaign missions are a heavy lift for us because there is so much scripting and story around those so there's a just tremendous amount of effort going into new campaign missions and also into continuing to improve the missions that we've already launched uh we will have sort of seasonal events uh towards the end of the year with some unlockable content uh so we're calling that a mini War chest um for the Cooperative mode adding mutators which just add extra challenge not that we need it it's clearly we've got to be able to beat it on normal first uh and yeah map editor showcase is sort of a a pre of where we're headed longer term with the map editor but we are working

really hard to get that into shape to share with people uh we got requests uh not surprisingly to be able to save your progressing campaign we do have a checkpoint system yeah would be one of those requests maybe yeah pause is coming quickly um yeah that was one of those known known things that we wanted to get inut just didn't make the cut uh and then we're going to be adding some more tier three units as well every race does currently have le one tier three but more more to come and next year there's so much uh yeah 3b3 as a new game mode competitive with Heroes with unique wind condition so not not just destroy the enemy base we got the debut of the map editor like into player hands next year a whole bunch of new campaign missions and

support three players in the campaign uh the integrated tournament system and people want to spin up their own t tournaments uh that I'm really excited about being able to provide that in an integrated way and uh yeah fullon War chests and then the learning tool system uh last but not least that we're working on with untapped.gg these guys created some wonderful learning tools for Hearthstone and marble snap and Magic Gatherings so working with them to provide some learning tools that will have an integrated client components uh in storm so just so much exciting stuff that's coming I have a very unpopular question I mean this looks like a lot of work a lot of resources as well and uh I mean you raise some money obviously but you're not going to go any anywhere right you have enough money to actually

release all of these because it looks like I mean obvious like the the whole um gaming Market is not very easy and uh yeah we're very fortunate um to have had great backing from investors and as you guys mentioned some great support um from the community Through Kickstarter Indi goo and start engine um you know at the end of the day like any company uh we have to be producing things that players enjoy and that players continue to purchase so um you know the mission for us as a company is to execute against that and to build fun content um and to build things that players enjoy and continue to purchase and so as long as we succeed at that uh I hope that we get to work on this game for decades um as the blizzard games have all lived continued to be popular for decades that's very much our goal

mean yeah I think soend I think yeah yeah that would perfect like just just wanted to add like I really think that like if the you know I don't think so there's any ever experience on the market currently that really gives this kind of like the the custom battl thing that that was happening back then and if you can really ride this train with like fully upgraded new platform for like there's definitely a big potential that because a lot of big games are basically platforms like Roblox and so on which are in the end driven by ugc content in the end all of us uh grew up on the Starcraft like are now a little bit older but still playing games and it's very big uh audience I would say even though it's a bit C than than the rest but still well I think speaking Yeah you know the audience is the thing that um motivates us more than

anything um as much as this audience is a hardcore audience um they are a wonderful audience and an audience that we feel close to after all of these years working on blizzard RTS so um yeah our goal is to make people happy and we're very committed to trying to do that amazing de thank you very much for coming on the podcast and for playing with us as well it's great honor and uh sorry I wasn't able to carry it I wish I were a better player I this this we fa miserably as we expected no worries no as I said that that's completely okay anyway like wishing all the best with the global release next month and yeah we can't wait to see like all these things that we saw in the road map getting there awesome well thank you guys for me on really enjoy go play the game great yep all right guys thank you very much

uh for listening and watching and then please if you have like yeah um any any comments feedback share in the in the comment section on YouTube and uh please subscribe and play the game yes play the game thank you cheers until next time bye-bye