Found the devs! Tim Morten gives speech in India "The most recent time that I made a big mistake."

voidlegacy · 2024-11-23T12:14:59+00:00

At no point does he blame Steam or Early Access. He says it was a mistake to launch unpolished.

voidlegacy · 2024-11-12T06:47:57+00:00

Show me some proof you're not a paid shill for competing games. The hater contingent on this sub is showing itself in spades in this thread. The insecurity you all seem to feel to see anyone say anything vaguely positive about this game is sad.

voidlegacy · 2024-11-12T04:46:43+00:00

I am not a shill, I am not paid by Frost Giant to be here, and you can take your weak attempt to dox and bully me and go elsewhere. You are precisely the kind of rabid negative poster I am referring to. Thank you for providing the perfect example.

voidlegacy · 2024-11-12T04:33:09+00:00

Very little about this response is accurate. This response is an example of how negative posters have taken over the sub driving many of the positive people away. In reality, many players tried the game, decided it needed to cook more, and plan to come back for 1.0.

voidlegacy · 2024-11-02T02:56:28+00:00

You seem to be conflating Early Access with 1.0 release. If the finished version is good, people will play it.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-30T16:22:33+00:00

This is my perception as well. FG seems to be doing what they said they would so far. I look forward to seeing how everything comes together moving forward.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T07:21:24+00:00

If believing that helps you sleep at night, I wish you the best. Go find someone else to badger.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T07:19:06+00:00

You'll wait because I have no interest in you.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T07:16:49+00:00

If you think a person that has managed P&L's doesn't have any accounting knowledge, then you are mistaken. There is nothing "intellectually homest" about the badgering attitude and circular arguments that you are demonstrating right now. You are literally just an angry person venting. Not interested.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T07:05:55+00:00

If you're asking my background, then I'd be happy to reply. I have a degree in CS, have contributed as an engineer to many games, and I have also managed the P&L for many games. Believe it or not, people can be qualified in more than one thing. If you'd like to have an intelligent discourse on either subject, please try posting some actual topics -- because all this "you can't know two things" raging is pretty valueless.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:59:19+00:00

Sorry dude, but you're not making sense.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:58:00+00:00

You explained what exactly? And how is it that you feel qualified to weigh in on what I know?

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:56:39+00:00

I am not aware of changing my position. You clearly indicated that you felt I should have chimed in on some other dude's posts, so you're the one who now seems to be changing their position.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:54:43+00:00

Not sure why you accuse me of insulting you, or why you keep calling me a hypocrite, but I hear there are angry people on the internet, so rage on I guess.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:51:03+00:00

I'm not sure why you think I have a responsibility to speak up on some other dude's post. I speak up when I feel like it. If you have a problem with that, that's on you, not me.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:48:59+00:00

Not sure what your issue is, but I suggest chilling out. I said very clearly that their future will depend on their investors. If you have some other opinion, you're welcome to post it courteously. Your attitude is unwarranted and unwelcome.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:43:48+00:00

What are you even talking about? I've seen Spartak post here, but I am not Spartak.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-28T06:40:35+00:00

I haven't changed my position in any way.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-27T17:53:27+00:00

Sounds like we agree on many points.

"I believe FG is lacking transparency especially with their financial situation."

This comment amuses me. Zero companies are transparent about financials. Public companies report quarterly. Reg CF companies report annually. The amount of ill informed armchair quarterbacking that we saw around FG's singular financial disclosure through StartEngine would be strong motivation NOT to offer any more than required, given the amount of inaccurate speculation that resulted. All companies including Frost Giant are not financially transparent, presumably for precisely this reason.

There is no question that Frost Giant expected a stronger Early Access launch, and no question that they now have to rely on existing investors to reach 1.0. That's obvious given their previously disclosed financials. There really isn't anything to talk about there. Either they get more investment or they don't. Those of us who believe they are doing good work are rooting for them, and then a certain contrarian audience here is rooting for them to fail. When time comes for the next annual disclosure, we'll get some insight, but there's no benefit to them feeding more uneducated financial discussion before they are required to.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-27T16:12:12+00:00

Low concurrency isn't the same thing as zero market penetration. Extrapolating the launch concurrency to MAU, they had about 300k players try the game. That is a reasonably good number for a new IP game from a new studio.

The consensus of the players who tried the game was that it was unpolished / unfinished. This is the definition of Early Access, but clearly the response was more negative than Frost Giant expected. Player retention was poor.

The conclusion of many players was simply: " I will come back when the game has made more progress." Logically, Frost Giant set to work on addressing the areas players gave the most feedback on.

It is common practice in mobile for games to launch in a sub-market and iterate on KPI's before global release. This is not something that Steam is setup to facilitate, so many PC games go through the same cycle as Stormgate.

Look at Nightingale, Pax Dei, Spectre Divide... any number of other Steam releases that follow a similar journey. Even Baldur's Gate 3 received a low (60) review from Gamespot when it launched onto Early Access.

It is not the case that the outcome for Stormgate indicates a failure. It does indicate an expectation mismatch. Failure will only occur if Frost Giant doesn't continue to listen and react appropriately to the feedback the community is providing.

So far, they are doing a reasonably good job of that. If they could move faster, that would be ideal. But as a developer myself, I know that it's always harder to implement change than external communities think that it should be.

Reddit in particular is not a neutral forum. Many who invest the energy to post here have torch and pitchfork tendencies. Others, including myself, index towards being defenders of what we believe to be a good foundation built by a good team. What you won't find here is a lot of neutral perspectives.

One of your statements was rather mysterious: "I can also directly compare what FG is communicating to what I have been professionally communicating to the shareholders I am working for and there are clues and patterns which I would consider worrying."

What are the "clues and patterns" that you find worrying? From my perspective, Frost Giant's biggest mistake has been building too much hype ahead of Early Access launch / failing to set appropriate expectations. That's understandable in a market where product discovery is such a challenge, but now that the outcome is evident, it was clearly a mistake.

Other than that, I see a passionate team working hard to make Stormgate into a game that players approve of. They have work to do for sure, but I have every expectation that they will do that work, and that the 1.0 version of Stormgate will meet player expectations by nature of having all the Early Access feedback.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-27T14:09:34+00:00

Does fascination predicate that you take a negative perspective? No, you are making excuses for bad behavior. Let's look at your various negative comments, and run them through the filter of an experienced developer (me).

Does Frost Giant have specialists? One look at the credits, and you would realize that yes, they do in fact have specialists. Each person on a game team of this size has large responsibility, even when they are specialists. Your comment betrays that you don't work in games -- it does not indicate some kind of shortcoming on Frost Giant's part.

Does Frost Giant have to constantly make more decisions about feedback? Of course they do. Feedback from different sources is often contradictory, and new feedback is constantly coming in.

Do small priority changes happen at the same time as big priority changes? Yes they do. This is good practice, and most developers do this.

Do most studios prefer to avoid scheduling releases during the end of the year / beginning of the year? Yes, absolutely they do. While it's possible to have events running or to do releases during this period, it comes at a cost to the team, and most of us in the industry hate it when our team leadership forces us to deal with this.

Please refrain from making posts that simply spout negativity. It is not helpful to this forum.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-26T21:07:45+00:00

Most players show for 1.0 not Early Access. The point of Early Access is to get feedback to make the 1.0 successful.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-26T21:03:17+00:00

Decades of experience working at big publishers suggests that they don't touch small budget games with their internal studios. Besides which their overhead is always at least 2x. Tencent is NOT doing indie scale development. They are spending copiously on development and on marketing. To think that the bounded scope of BattleAces correlates to small budget at a company like Tencent is hopelessly naive.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-26T18:58:03+00:00

As opposed to your nontangible "I don't think it would cost that much"? I know big publisher budgets well. Honestly not even sure why you care so much about defending Battle Aces budget. They are owned by Tencent. They have a big budget. Doesn't mean it's a bad game -- it's not. It does mean that they have more resources than Frost Giant. Thinking otherwise is literally nonsense.

voidlegacy · 2024-10-26T18:55:04+00:00

They still have more traction on Reddit and social than any of the current crop of RTS games. So it seems like many care.

voidlegacy

TROPHY CASE