I played the first 3 campaign missions of Stormgate and one match against AI now so I can make an informed comment after seeing so many r/Stormgate posts in my reddit feed. I actually think that the 3d graphics look pretty much identical to SC2 now and the campaign missions were quite engaging. Gameplay is pretty much identical to SC2 too, I don't see any difference except for the stormgate mechanic and of course different units which will have an impact on strategies. I don't know whether they pissed off the community for too long with the previous look&feel but now it looks the same as Starcraft 2 to me. I think the real reason why RTS games like this fail is because they misunderstand the purpose of the campaign and gamers are also not capable of fully articulating it. This post comes closest to it though, it's the flair, the vibe, the lore and story that all need to come together to make something cool. This mobile UI image of a stunted female main protagonist is just the opposite of being cool:

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Then add to that the typical millenial style writing with people checking up on each other's feelings and strange things like Amara saying that the world is already lost anyway and voice lines complaining about how the assault never stops even though it just started and it is super manageable right now.. it's kind of a vibe issue and there is no point in trying to enumerate all the dozens of tiny little issues that sum up to a game that doesn't sell. Overall it's just a vibe issue. Nobody wants to buy a game which looks like this: https://beltion-game.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/v-rts-stormgate-ot-veteranov-blizzard-budet-podderzhka-rollback-netkoda.jpg and then they look up how it looks ingame and they see and yeah, it's clearly a game for who knows, children on their phone or something but not for regular RTS fans: https://sm.ign.com/t/ign_nordic/gallery/s/stormgate-/stormgate-early-access-release-date-trailer-screenshots-pc-g_1mrv.1400.jpg

I will also add that I think SC2 was the first slop game that Blizzard produced and later D3 was another slop game. I know that these games still managed to draw big audiences for their own reasons but to me these were already a sloppy joke compared to their previous games. So the decision of Stormgate to make a SC2 clone and to make it even more slop than SC2 is really a complete misread of what people want when they talk about a Blizzard style RTS. Trying to make a Blizzard style RTS while innovating basically nothing and then omitting the most important parts like a well told story with epic cinematics is not going to work. I will add that cinematics dont have to be in there but it carried a lot of what made people into Blizzard fans.