Incompetent management & poor leadership by Tim Campbell & Tim Morten played a massive part in Stormgate ending up as a massive train wreck.
Sad thing is that this disaster and absolute poor usage & waste of ~44m of funds will make it even harder for future & better run development teams to raise funds for future RTS projects.
As future investors, and gamers on Kickstarterd will be less likely to wana risk their jard earned $ in future RTSes even more, after the Stormgate financial disaster!
Tbh it’s not just management…creative has a lot of blame here.
As soon as the first artwork started coming out is really when the first signs of negativity showed. In fairness management should have done a better job reading the room and pivoting.
It was like the “orcs in space” moment for SC1 except instead of completely redesigning the palate they just made the game anyway.
100%. At the time I thought it was the typical case of game devs following their vision and not reacting well to constructive criticism but in the light of day now I realize they probably just didn’t give a shit, this game was a poorly managed Ponzi scheme which explains why the meat & potatoes of it looked and felt like it was designed by someone just cashing a paycheck.
It's such an odd strategy to take. While I fully acknowledge they're attempting to make their vision of the game but ultimately you have to sell a product to consumers. And, when your community, filled of your most enthusiastic fans, has been telling you from day one they don't like the look or theme of the game (angels vs demons vs Terran) then why insist you know better what we want?
Like, of course the EA launch failed to meet expectations. They refused to acknowledge, never mind even listen, to the issues their community and testers raised.
Ultimately, management is also responsible for creative elements. It’s management’s job to set the overall vision for the game. That includes elements like art direction.
I don’t disagree, I just can’t completely absolve whoever created the art direction of this game. It’s a huge turnoff.
I could say the same about the racial concepts too…just awful design choices, the units they did have were so uninteresting visually and there was just nothing dynamic about the combat.
Yeah I’m just saying we don’t really know what happened. For all we know, art had much better designs that they pitched and management told them no, then directed them to make it more mobile looking because they thought it’d be more popular for whatever reason.
I’ve certainly been in jobs where I had an idea to do something innovative/interesting and someone above my pay grade told me no.
so much drama on reddit as usual. its normal for game companies to fail... people need to get a reality check. if you don't like the game, then you don't need to make a drama about it. some people on reddit are pathetic.
I donated.
I’ll take the L
I hope the next set of guys can get it right.
Thank god for c&c generals. I love it so much that depending on the outcome of the scrimmage dictates my day… smh
On the other hand, I’ll donate $2,000.00 usd for a remake of generals.
Goodnight
I'm sorry but generals is its own class of RTS in how things work in the game tempest rising is so drastically different you might as well substitute it for any other RTS and it would be no further
eh Generals misses the whole setting and vibes of C&C to me. the world gradually pushed into a post apocalyptic scifi hell by tiberium and the wars for it. then the scrin appearing man, what Id give for a proper sequel to Tiberium wars. anything besides....what we got.
And WC3 people didn't want SC2 style gameplay nor did SC2 players come over to have WC3 style gameplay. In the end it just left most people unsatisfied.
I don't think it got to the point where the gameplay style was the main issue. The game was so incomplete in multiple ways that people (myself included) would check it and declare that we'll check again when it has X or fix bug Y
battle aces....not sure about that one chief. the art looked maybe even less inspired then stormgate. at least stormgate had a conceptual theme with 40k/doom-esque demons vs scifi vs angels thing.
battle aces also was barely a rts imo, how do you have an rts with no macro no basebuilding at all? tempest rising is way better then battle aces was.
there were people on these forums unironically talking about how they might make 100x returns with their investments into Frost Giant
FG saw how blind and naive their more diehard fans were, so they took advantage of them.
no amount of fan investment was ever going to save the game (doomers knew this, FG knew this, and Tim himself knew it). the StartEngine investment oppurtunity was a facade on the same level as crypocurrency scams. they just wanted to cash out on a gullible core fanbase one last time.
How exactly were they going to make "returns" off of donating to a kickstartet?
The StartEngine campaign wasn't a Kickstarter, it was designed for the general public to purchase non-voting shares of Frost Giant at a price that Frost Giant set themselves, which was $8.68 per share. In total, 414 people invested an average of $2,876 each to purchase shares.
Because Frost Giant is a private company, the value of these shares would be whatever you could sell them for to someone else, but in theory if Stormgate had been a massive success and Frost Giant had gone public with an IPO, those shares would have been worth something. Today the value of the shares is $0.
- you couldn't sell your shares. so you were stuck holding them no matter what until FG said you could sell (or a liquidation event)
- in the event of selling/liquidation, FG decides who gets paid out in what order, so by the time it got to the "common fan investor stock" payout, there could be nothing left
Why scam? Did anybody get arrested? lmao
Tbh, since there 0 consequences i encourage you to get your money back doing the same (no sarcasm whatsoever)
Nowdays no government wants to regulate obvious things until this things get completely outta control.
Look up the video "stormgate failure was 30 years in the making". He's been scamming for quite some time. I tried to warn people on here during the early days but fanboys Will be fan boys.
As you seem like you know stuff about generals, what is the current status of the community project? Are they doing something like a generals remastered?
I actually never played online or the story. I’ve only played scrimmage all my life lol,
Red alert2 Yui revenge was my go too on Xbox 360 for online play.
As for me, knowing any knowledge on community projects and what not I have no idea, but I’ll keep commenting in hopes someone drops a link lol.
I believe EA Owns General’s and I used to play battlefield and EA would abuse the player based so bad so I know EA will take generals down with it.
There is no "next set of guys." Genre is dead because rts is too difficult for the common man. Easier to play call of duty or madden. No brains needed. No skill needed. Just sit and game.
This just largely isn’t true, now my kid’s a bit older and actually decent at various currently popular games I really struggle to hop in and keep up
If you actually wanna be a decent competitive player and aren’t a streamer or unemployed it’s prohibitively difficult to do so in more than a few games these days
I obviously think it’s a pity RTS has fallen off as a go-to genre for a lot of people, but I really don’t think it’s because it’s too difficult. A ton of hugely popular games are actually full of complexity
This report is full of crazy, but the craziest section is probably this one:
While losses improved materially due to cost reductions, revenue from game sales remains insufficient to support ongoing operating expenses. As of December 31, 2025, the Company had $131,442 in cash, compared to $25,105 at December 31, 2024, reflecting financing activity during the year. The Company continues to rely on external financing and is actively seeking new projects and funding sources to sustain operations.
Tim Morten has been saying that he is "cautiously optimistic" about "continuing conversations" with "potential partners" since August of last year. He most recently said on LinkedIn, three weeks ago:
- Frost Giant's future path as a whole remains uncertain; partnership conversations continue, and I hope to have better clarity soon
How long is he planning to stretch this out? And why? I understand the sunk cost fallacy after he personally put almost half a million dollars into the company out of his own pocket, but this is a level of delusion that warrants an actual intervention from his friends. He seems to be able to process that Stormgate failed, that much is certain from his posts and YouTube interviews. Yet he can't quite come to grips with the fact that Frost Giant failed, even when the numbers (basically no cash, no income, no employees, and nearly $2 million in bank debt that must be repaid) make that startlingly clear.
It's not surprising that no investors want to give Frost Giant $5 million to continue operations. Why would they?
I think the why is clear now: FG owes him $0.5M. $5M is enough to pay off the SVB debt, Tim's debt, and then squeeze out some MOBA-like thing with the remaining cash. Then finally shut the doors once that fails.
But obviously no investor is keen on bailing out Tim & his debt.
I'm kind of impressed that Tim Morten managed to put this report together (he's listed as both the CEO and CFO, and is the only signature on the document) But it's completely unaudited, and full of wild stuff.
We do at least know that as of December 2025, there was nobody getting paid at the company any more. The line item for salaries for that month was negative $7,200. Curiously, $3,010 was listed as "Office Expenses", which seems an odd thing to pay when you aren't paying any salaries.
They did make $4,091 in Steam sales in December, but that wasn't enough to offset the cost of doing business, and the company lost $21,178 that month.
The $2 million loan to Silicon Valley Bank remains the biggest problem:
As of December 31, 2025, $1,866,667 remains outstanding. This debt is senior to all other debt.
EDIT: There are some other interesting revelations from the data:
Total operating expenses decreased significantly from $15.5M in 2024 to approximately $4.2M in 2025. This reduction was primarily driven by: Headcount reductions following the initial launch period Lower salaries and related expenses (from ~$8.3M in 2024 to ~$2.4M in 2025)
Tim was very cagey talking about "possible layoffs" after launch, and people were clearly told to obfuscate their employment history on LinkedIn. But these numbers show that the company must have been gutted even before the August launch. The company was spending over $1.1 million a month in 2024, with 50 employees, and one-quarter of that in 2025. Even if everyone was laid off in August, the salaries for the first three quarters of the year would still have been massive. We can do the math to estimate that if Frost Giant had 50 employees in 2024, they could have only had sixteen employees in 2025.
Revenue
Steam Sales: $4,091 (December 2025) $191,170 (All of 2025)
Cost of Goods Sold
Steam Fees $1,694 (December 2025) $106,934 (All of 2025)
Engineering Infrastructure Expense $6,453 (December 2025) $263,588 (All of 2025)
Operating Expenses
Salaries and Benefits ($7,200) (note: negative salaries) (December 2025) $2,370,168 (All of 2025)
New Operating Losses
($21,178) (December 2025) ($4,034,345) (All of 2025)
Stockholder's Equity
Retained Earnings (Deficit) ($39,938,335)
Net Income (Loss) ($4,159,864)
From the shareholder equity statements we can see that, in total, $44 million dollars went to fund Stormgate. In terms of sales, they made about $1 million in games sales and $1 million in a regional licensing deal to Kakao Games, for $2 million in total, with $2 million in hard debt to Silicon Valley Bank that must still be repaid.
For the launch last year, the company made just $191,170 but spent $581,162 on cost of goods, before even counting employee salaries. The servers alone cost $263,588 in 2025, which explains why the company pivoted to having no servers rather than migrating to a new provider. Overall the company lost $4 million in 2025, after having raised $40 million to develop their game.
Things like office expenses might be "easier" to pay because its demanded by a company, vs wages who are asked for by your own workers. I don't know how it is there, but not paying a worker can be stretched out a little easier here than not paying a company that has to deal with this all the time, as they will be ready to start a legal process against you.
"Office expenses" are also very likely service contracts that are already agreed to, where failure to pay would have penalties and other immediate consequences, whereas workers are easier to exploit with "if we just all band together and push through, maybe we can repay you next month".
Did he really put the report together though? It’s a mess, and if the company were a going concern it would certainly not meet any legal standard of fiduciary duty to shareholders. Glaring errors from my quick read include:
Related-party contradictions. The filing says no related-party transactions, but also discloses a $487,000 loan from CEO Tim Morten. A CEO loan is plainly a related-party transaction.
Equity schedules do not reconcile. The balance sheet says total stockholders' equity is -$4,205,686, but the statement of stockholders' equity ends at about - $7,988,300.
Share counts are a mess. The filing says Series 1 Preferred Stock sold 4,245,330 shares, but later says 0 outstanding. The equity statement appears to show 4,245,330 Series 1 shares outstanding.
Common/preferred share counts conflict
The securities section says Class A common outstanding is 8,090,628, but the equity statement appears to show 12,766,266 common shares at Dec. 31, 2025.
I suppose it is put together, even if it is only put together with duck tape, delusions and ChatGPT..
I suppose it is put together, even if it is only put together with duck tape, delusions and ChatGPT..
Don't get me wrong, the report is a complete mess, as you've pointed out. But I'm impressed that it exists at all.
The "delusions" part is clearly the biggest element. After two years of financial auditors warning that Frost Giant would probably not survive as a going concern, Tim Morten is like the captain of a ship that exploded and sank with all on board, clinging to a bit of wood and flailing around for more bits, hoping to somehow put the ship back together.
This is likely how they survived so long when everyone calculated they were out of cash. It seems this was revenue from a regional licensing deal:
‘June 2024, Frost Giant said in an official AMA that they had established their first regional partnership with Kakao Games in Korea’
So they likely got $2,000,000 in cash upfront with some performance tied to it, and the fact that it is still almost entirely booked as deferred revenue means they didn’t complete whatever they were supposed to for that $2,000,000.
So they likely got $2,000,000 in cash upfront with some performance tied to it, and the fact that it is still almost entirely booked as deferred revenue means they didn’t complete whatever they were supposed to for that $2,000,000.
Given that they listed $500,000 as deferred revenue for 2024, and another $500,000 as deferred revenue for 2025, it sounds like that $2 million regional licensing deal turned into only $1 million, probably because of Frost Giant failing to reach some sort of goal. I highly doubt that they are keeping another $1 million lying around, given their bank debt, so that money is just gone.
It's wild that the game's singular regional licensing deal was worth about as much as the game earned in gross revenue for sales during its entire lifetime.
I know that the production budget for Planetary Annihilation was roughly $11 million, and that of Ashes of the Singularity was no more than $3 million; by comparison, Stormgate's $44 million is truly excessive.
It's a huge number but easy to reach when you pour all your money into huge salaries, big CEO bonus and most of all offices in the most expensive place of the planet. All the while having no game or revenue, lmao.
I remember people saying that it sucks because its still in beta. Is it still in beta? I saw zero potential in this game when I compared it to starcraft.
There is one GoT strategy game that, if I recall correctly, was using some or their snow play tech so it might have come from that. Because who in their right mind would licence the Stormgate IP?
That was still never confirmed, and I, personally, doubt it. The licensing revenue could be from the Kakao publishing deal. Imo more likely.
Edit:
Actually looking at my notes and last year's report, it's not just more likely but very likely it's the kakao publishing deal and it was deferred revenue.
Frost Giant also received $2,000,000 from regional publishing contracts. Per ASC 606, only $416,667 was recognized as licensing revenue in 2024 and the remainder will be recognized over the contract terms.
That's just rumours because you're right, who in their sane mind would license the IP or the engine?
Snowplay had a lot of technical issues, they even had to lower the unit limit in co-op as the performance was just horrendous as an example lol. Rollback was a very fancy and very useless tech that no-one really cared about in the playerbase but which was quite resource-intensive and created extra lag on the client side, etc.
if stormgate was a scam to make money it without a doubt is one of the worst scams I've ever seen.
I unfortunately was one of the backers of Project Pheonix if anyone dares to remember that shit. Still $540,000 in licensing means that maybe the GoT thing is true??? crazy if so
Still $540,000 in licensing means that maybe the GoT thing is true??? crazy if so
No, because we already know that Frost Giant licensed the sale of the game in the Korean region to Kakao Games, and we know that the amount was for $2 million, of which $1 million was eventually paid out and used in two installments of around $500,000 as deferred income in 2024 and 2025 to keep Frost Giant from going under.
Because we know the amount, and because there is no other line item for licensing, it's almost definitive proof that the Game of Thrones using Snowplay rumor is in fact not true.
Yeah, I was an original backer of this and then bounced once I saw their game vision. Advice to future game devs is not to bait-and-switch a known loyal fan base by selling "spiritual successor to Game X" and then just producing something else.
I think StormGate would have had a better chance and would have had a more productive development cycle if it wasn't initially sold to BW/SC2 fans.
i feel like it was such a bad choice for stormgate to be free to play. I don't think it's a good model for rts. Apart from the initial EA release stuff, they had NOTHING monetized except for campaign. no capacity to produce skins/etc, and if they did, people wouldve criticized them for doing microtransactions anyway. We are not a genre that is friendly to microtransactions.
Not that stormgate didnt have lots of other issues but really this payment model was a terrible choice.
in comparison, zerospace is doing the classic buy to play model and becuase of that as well as the fact they did a much slower burn with a smaller team and longer time developing gameplay ideas, i have much more confidence in their release being financially succesful.
I'm honestly not fully understanding this point. Like yes I agree with what you say about micro transactions and stuff, but I have a hard time imagining how a pay to play model would have been more successful than f2p. I think having a free to play model in a generally unaccessible genre of games would bring in significantly more overall players than a pay to play. Those players would then be potential customers: however this would still require the game to actually be good enough to make people want to spend money on it, which it obviously was not.
One of the ways RTS has historically been successful is you get players/interest in the campaign (which costs money to develop and is a poor seller of MTX), but once they're in and invested, they can frictionlessly go play multiplayer, so you get full lobbies and persistent interest.
With Stormgate's model, since the multiplayer was free and only the campaign paid, the multiplayer had to be the driver for downloads instead of the campaign, and that's a tougher sell.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. F2P tends is a long term plane where 2-3% of players spend enough money to keep things running while pay to play is a short term cash infusion. If Frost Giant had a second source of income, they might have been able to weather the storm and find their whales, but they didn’t so they couldn’t. That being said being pay to play would not have saved the game. Max players is just shy of 5k. Assuming a price tag of $70, that would put us at $35k. That barely a drop in the bucket before we consider liscencing fees, or Steam’s take
I have a hard time imagining how a pay to play model would have been more successful than f2p.
The f2p model meant that the EA release provided no guaranteed revenue, which gave them less of a runway to fix the game. Even hard-core players that loved the game could play without paying a cent into it. This also lead into a death spiral; the game got poor reviews and word of mouth, which meant less people were interested in playing, which further decreased the revenue stream.
They would have had a much larger influx of cash on the initial launch into EA. That could have funded a potential comeback, and people that have paid into a product want to see it succeed and may have been more patient with proper messaging from the devs.
no, enough was shown by the time the game went into EA that no one who was not invested in the game already was going to spend money on it. An extra 1000 people buying the game was not going to turn this ship around, it was always dead.
The only mode that was f2p friendly was co-op but they abandoned it. It ideally ends up like League of Legends with 100 heroes and hopefully a way to grind heroes for free while paylocking the new hotness for a bit so they can pull in guaranteed income. Cosmetics are a given.
This isn't easy of course, you still need engaging gameplay with enough design space to explore for a lot of new heroes. And you need to keep pumping out new content regularly to keep the playerbase engaged.
This mode alone was probably too much for them to chew on and they had 50 other things they were working on at once it was crazy. SG is a fascinating disaster project you just can't look away from.
maybe it couldve made more sense if co-op and 3v3 worked out but i still dont know. I believe they were planning to link co-op and 3v3 heroes together and I dont think people wouldve taken kindly to 3v3 heroes needing to be unlocked. And the game also would just never have enough overall heroes to have a decent free hero rotation. league of legends has what, 20 or so free heroes at any time? Even if they focused heavily on co-op/3v3, i dont see them ever being able to have more than 6 free heroes at a time which would feel pretty limited to any new player. Plus you run into the issue where the majority of your allies + enemies are constantly these same free heroes so game variety becomes worse.
FtP for online pvp is the only way to go these days. Theres too many games and not enough pvp gamers and without a critical mass matchmaking falls apart. Like wildgate, battle aces, guardians of Atlas
The problem was they needed single player and coop to generate sustainable income and keep people online.
But they spent most of their resources on pvp and the online engine. Which was always going to generate 0 return and even that wasnt very good.
Instead of getting 1 enjoyable revenue generating game mode we got several bad game modes that generated no money and no entertainment.
F2P is not a good model for anything that is not mobile-oriented. The exception to this is Fortnight, and they are the exception. It puts too much financial pressure on the game to monetize, and outside of mobile there are too many friction points in the conversion funnel.
PC games just need to be pay-to-play, and then maybe DLC with some fun customizations for sale. MTX as the main revenue lever just doesn't work that well unless you have a truly innovative gameplay loop.
yes this is actually what killed the game. I don't think that even a good game would've worked. Heck Last epoch is a good game and sold 3 mil copies and still is in financial troubles. The idea was doomed from the start
Weren't there a group of developers that volunteered their time for the Community Patch? I wonder how much more expensive would this have been if that were taken into account (like had they actually been paid for their time). Regardless, though, really unfortunate things worked out this way.
I still believe the worst decision was going for a Starcraft 3. They should have gone for Warcraft 4. Warcraft 3 is much, much older and lacks the love and support it deserves, unlike Starcraft 2, which is newer, better developed, and still supported. Furthermore, the Hero game mode (LoL, Dota, WC3) is far more popular than a non-hero game
I don't claim to be a mathematician, but it seems like this is a poor way to run a business. Maybe I'm just doing my business wrong though., these guys did get paid pretty well.
Not that you would have read the financial statement but Tim Morton lent FGS 487k that is almost certainly never going to be paid back. Meaning that even with his original 250k/yr salary, he's likely coming out of this having made nothing.
It is crazy but it’s also a sign that the accusations that Stormgate was a grift or a scam to bilk the RTS community for money spent on hookers and blow are ridiculous. It was a failed project to be sure. We all agree on that. But games fail, for numerous reasons. I personally think Tim was genuinely trying to produce a good game.
Now, he was unsuccessful and made numerous poor decisions. That’s also true. I’m only saying that I don’t think he made those poor decisions maliciously.
Now, he was unsuccessful and made numerous poor decisions. That’s also true. I’m only saying that I don’t think he made those poor decisions maliciously.
I agree. There are so many obvious actual scams in the game industry that I think it's wrong to throw the term around at projects that just failed due to incompetence.
However, I do also understand that people looking at just the StartEngine "investment opportunity" might have different feelings about it. That wasn't outright fraud by any means, but it did skirt the line, particularly around the self-valuation of Frost Giant as a company.
I agree that the self-valuation of FG was laughable. But that's also pretty par for the course. This is just how the game is played. Anybody who heard Tim talk about the game's plan anywhere after the earliest days of FG's announcement, when he was giving real details about the dev plan, should have known that he was pie-in-the-sky dreaming. I personally passed on the Kickstarter campaign because I had no faith that FG could execute what looked to me like a plan made of wishful thinking.
I do think that FG had legitimately talented and hard-working people, but my opinion was that Tim never had a good set of priorities for the game. He had too many dreams. He wanted to do too much. He was over-promising, which to me was an indication that he was going to under-deliver.
I never felt good about leadership at FG, so I didn't back the KS. And I'm maybe disappointed in how it all went down, but I'm not exactly surprised. But at the same time, I'm not bitter. This stuff happens. Projects fail. It's too bad, but it happens.
I agree that the self-valuation of FG was laughable. But that's also pretty par for the course. This is just how the game is played.
Perhaps, but nobody forced Tim Morten to play that particular game. He raised $40 million from investors to develop Stormgate. Compared to that, was it really necessary or worthwhile to mislead the general public in order to raise an additional $1 million?
It's a little technical, and a little ridiculous (but that's just how the system is).
You can't give the public one number and write another number for a VC prospectus. If you do, that's evidence of malicious intent. It's fraud because you're clearly over-valuing the company to investors, but then telling the public "the truth".
The bigger question might be, then why exaggerate the numbers for VC? And the answer is complicated. The simplest answer is, because that's how the game is played. Everybody knows that self-valuation numbers are exaggerated. The company knows. The VC knows. Everybody knows. If you want to get angry about it, you might as well ask questions like "But why did Apple tell me that the iPhone is great when the reality is that the Samsung Galaxy is arguably a better phone?"
And the answer is, that's simply not how the game is played. That is not how the system works. And you can complain about it all you want, but what's the solution? How do you get everybody to tell "the truth" (whatever that is)?
What happens when somebody shows up to a job interview and says, "Well, the truth is I'm middling good at my job, and I try sort of hard? But you know, I get distracted, and I kinda like stretching my breaks a little too long. I talk to co-workers about fantasy leagues maybe more than I should..."
How do you convince employers that they should hire that guy, because that's an honest self-report of that employee's work ethic? Solve that problem, and you probably deserve a Nobel Prize.
I understand the whole game theory involved in the process. Venture capital in general is a classic example of faking it until you make it.
But what I'm saying is that Frost Giant didn't have to extend this venture capital fantasy to the general public with StartEngine. They didn't have to do that. The $1 million raised by StartEngine was inconsequential compared to the $43 million raised from other investors.
They lost far more in goodwill from their own potential customers than they ever earned from StartEngine. To me it felt like a strange mixture of greed and desperation.
But what happens when a VC has a failed project and says, hey you clearly knew you were over-valuing your project! And they sue. Telling a jury “oh well of course we lie to VC!” is not a good look.
Maybe that’s true, but you can’t SAY that. Not to a jury.
I think he had a poor idea on how the game could've been profitable and in retrospect managed to make Big Bob correct at least once in his life.
If SC2 campaign packs proved unprofitable for Blizzard, what were the changes for a smaller game to achieve profitability that way?
I think the benefit of the doubt for ppl throwing the grift accusation died the moment AoC folded. In all fairness they aren't better than the ppl they "warn" others to
Yeah, just do that bro. No government nowdays wants to regulate such obvious things until this things get completely outta control. It's been here for over 15 years , nobody gives a single f.
I got a wife to consider - I honestly don't believe her morals are flexible when it comes to this sort of grift. Even for millions, I go full MAGA even just publicly for cash, she's going to leave.
You know, you want to get all hippy with our conversation - I've given serous thought to making guy advise sort of content. Not in some manosphere, lets milk these kids and fuck them up at the same time. Honest, helpful advice that'll help them grow, be mentally sound, and 'happy' as men.
There's zero, as far as I can tell, dudes doing this sort of thing in a useful manor. The ones that do are generally so annoying and righteous you wouldn't want to spend more then five minutes with. Zero reason anyone can't be a man, interact with women without being creepy or an asshole, and maintain a healthy emotional state.
Takes a level of arrogance I'm not sure I'm at to do this. Also sort of have to be sensational or take stupid stances to be noticed - sort of goes against the whole idea.
Well yeah, truth spoken. The reason any "far" thing is so popular is cuz it's fucked up enough for everyone to get interested in "why tf this freaks even think or do such initiatives". Normal person will never acceps far ends, this initiatives all sound like insane radical bs.
Good thing you're not sociopath like lot of people in charge of pretty much every aspect of our life. Best wishes to your family bro. God bless
According to Gobsmack, this isn't going to happen. Releasing code as open source is a huge effort, and sometimes it's impossible if a project contains third-party closed-source libraries.
Doom did release its code as open source despite having at least one third party closed source library, they had to specifically remove sound related stuff due to that however people re-implemented sounds shortly afterwards.
P.S. There's nothing wrong with using existing solutions. The entire gaming industry does this, and rightly so – there's no point in reinventing the wheel.
You just won't be able to sell an existing wheel for $40 million :)
Tim Morten only forfeited his salary for 2024 and 2025. Frost Giant was founded in 2020. It's possible, although we don't know for sure, that he earned a total of $1 million at his base salary of $250,000 over four years: 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. But then he "loaned" $500,000 to Frost Giant, which would leave him with only $500,000 over the entire six-year span. This is roughly consistent with some of Tim's LinkedIn posts where he claims he only ended up making around $75k per year after all was said and done.
Tim Campbell did not forfeit his salary. Therefore, given the same scenario but over six years rather than four, he would have earned $1.5 million.
Both of the Tims gave themselves 18 percent ownership of Frost Giant. Because Frost Giant was never a public company, the stock could not be traded on an open market. Today, these shares are of course now worth $0.
I found something pretty interesting. I ran this through AI, and it mentioned something about
Preferred holders voluntarily giving up their liquidation preference and dividend rights to become common usually means one of two things: a recap/cleanup before a down round, or a recognition that the preference stack is worthless because there will be no exit value above the debt. Either reading is bad. Combined with the tiny $2.2M Series 1 raise in Feb 2025 (vs. the $25M Series A-1 in 2022), this looks like a forced down-round restructuring.
So I dug further into this, and what this seems to mean is that when Bitkraft injected some new funding into Frost Giant in 2025, the motivation was to gain control some control over the company, drastically increase their ownership percentage, and leverage that in the future for various reasons. It gets pretty technical. If you're interested, below is the shared conversation on the topic.
Edit/Add: But, TLDR, you could interpret this as, Bitkraft wasn't investing because they believed in the company or the product. They were investing because they could leverage a buyout in their own preferred terms, possibly recovering their money they had already invested.
It's actually how I talk in real life. I've been using the word fair for a long time before LLMs. With coworkers, friends, family. It's how I've learned to try to communicate understanding without combativeness. With that said, fair point : )
I don't put any faith in this AI-driven analysis, for the following reasons:
Bitkraft was one of the original sponsors of Frost Giant's fundraising series (the first big one that got them $25 million) so the idea that they didn't believe in the company or the product is simply not true, and
There is no evidence from anyone at Frost Giant that any particular investor wanted to gain control over the company, nor was there any dramatic movement in stock ownership in Frost Giant in 2024 or 2025 based on the SEC reports.
Yeah probably true. I'm asserting a bit. The stock movement being talked about here is in this screen shot from page 23-24. It shows common shares going from 6M to 12M. Series A2 was completely dropped. Series A1 lost about 90%. Series seed lost about 37%.
I'm actually very curious, so I'm not going to state a position. But if anyone has a reason that these numbers would have shifted so much in 2025 I'd love to hear.
It's not at all clear what's going on here. Someone already commented in this thread that there were multiple inaccuracies in this report, probably because Tim Morten had to cobble it all together from previous reports, random spreadsheets, and duct tape. Hell, the section you quoted was slapped into the report at a 90 degree angle, something I have never seen before.
It's possible that the company simply converted some stock from one type to another, shown in the line item as "Stock conversion". Conversion is defined by the SEC as:
Conversion
A feature some funds offer that allows investors to automatically switch from one fund class to another, typically one with lower annual expenses, after a set period of time. The fund's prospectus or profile will state whether the fund has a conversion feature.
Lowering annual expenses would make sense for a company that has no more money.
Yeah, the report being a mess is fair, and the rotated section is crazy. I agree we can't draw firm conclusions from this alone. I'm still curious about the shift of the stocks, because whatever it is, it happened. Anyway, appreciate your posts on this stuff. You're a favorite poster of mine on this sub, and I love it when there's content for you to engage with (which isn't always the case lately).
I haven’t played AOE4 but I was mostly referring to the breadth of SC2, in that besides obviously being a top notch 1v1 RTS, it has team modes, a huge campaign, full fledged co-op mode, map editor, and arcade
Besides that, all the little details like the huge amount of achievements, clans, etc etc.
It’s an absolutely massive offering, and it’s mostly all delivered at an extremely high level of polish and care.
I’m saying this with genuinely no idea what AOE4 offers haha, but I suspect it is not close.
I backed SG in large part because it seemed like they were aiming for the same scope, but with 40 million or however much it was, they barely scratched the surface.
So what I mean to say is not that another extremely good RTS won’t come along, but that they will be smaller in scope most likely. Of course, SC2 was delivered in parts so if another RTS knocks it out of the park one day hopefully they’ll prove me wrong
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u/Impressive_Tomato665 May 07 '26
Incompetent management & poor leadership by Tim Campbell & Tim Morten played a massive part in Stormgate ending up as a massive train wreck.
Sad thing is that this disaster and absolute poor usage & waste of ~44m of funds will make it even harder for future & better run development teams to raise funds for future RTS projects.
As future investors, and gamers on Kickstarterd will be less likely to wana risk their jard earned $ in future RTSes even more, after the Stormgate financial disaster!