Stormgate, once penned as the most promising real-time strategy game in years and dubbed a massive esports prospect, is going offline at the end of April. It’s being taken off Steam because of a tricky situation with the game’s multiplayer provider, Hathora. The team at Frost Giant Studios shared the unfortunate news recently on Discord.
It was explained that Hathora has been bought out by an AI company that is expected to refocus resources in a grand pivot to LLM development. The only way Stormgate will retain online functionality is if a suitable partner is found, but for now, the game’s servers will be shut down in just a few weeks.
Stormgate Offline Mode Incoming?
Frost Giant Studios has stressed the intention to add an offline mode to Stormgate, the RTS title created by former Blizzard developers that surfaced in 2022. The game landed on Steam in 2025, almost two years after it entered a closed beta.
As a free-to-play title in a tight niche, Stormgate never made immense waves in the gaming space, but it was good enough to draw interest from those experienced in games like StarCraft.
In a recent message on the game’s Discord server, the team at Frost Giant Studios shared the dire news:
We have some unfortunate news. I’ll get straight to it:
- Our game server orchestration partner, Hathora, has been purchased by an AI company, and they are winding down their service at the end of April. This will create a planned outage for Stormgate’s multiplayer modes.
- Stormgate will be patched so that it can be played offline, but online modes will not be available at that point.
- We hope to restore online play in a future patch, but this work will be dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations.
We’re very grateful to our community of players, and we will post another update as more information is available, including more info about how offline mode works, and whether we get any patches out before the server wind down. Thank you for your support, The Frost Giant and Community Development team.
(Thanks to delistedgames.com for the spot)
On Steam, the game’s review sentiments have plummeted, marking it as ‘Mostly Negative’ in response to the news. Those who purchased the game more recently are hopeful that Frost Giant Studios will extend some kind of refund policy.
Stormgate started life as a crowdfunded title that boasted immense esports potential, especially given the decreasing energy in the competitive RTS space. It managed to pull in a massive $2.3 million from backers, 30 of whom stumped up a whopping $5,000 to support the development of the title.
Are you shocked at the imminent shutdown of Stormgate? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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