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You are good at your job. Seems to be a constant in this company.
Thank you, and we appreciate the support!
You are good at your job. Seems to be a constant in this company.
Thank you, and we appreciate the support!
Ah excellent, those newsletters were great and i did check my email and junk mail before posting the above, i just assumed they were no longer being done. Thanks for the response Gerald, love your work!
Thank you! Appreciate your support.
It's certainly a new space for GameDev fundraising, I don't think I've seen any other game try to raise money this way. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but people are also weary of new things, and this is definitely new.
Hi there! It's more "new-ish" than new--games have run equity crowdfunding campaigns for several years, including Psychonauts 2 (in 2016!), Outer Wilds, Wasteland 3, What the Golf?, and Pillars of Eternity 2.
Tasteless and Artosis playing willingly other game than BW?
plus other streamers. It is called marketing my friend. I am not implying anything, but i just assume it is paid advertisment, just like with the thousands of games in the last 15 yrs did it. Must not even be directly paid, could be a advisor position, future employment as casting talent, etc.
Also it is hard to take streamers at face value, when their (future) income is entangled to the project.
Since you’re speculating, I’ll just clarify—We have not paid a single creator to stream Stormgate or make any video content. You won’t find any #ad streams for our game. All the streams and videos, even from bigger variety creators like Asmongold and Lirik, have been authentic and unpaid. No promises of future payment or employment have been made, either.
Thanks for joining us on this adventure. <3
Sorry if this is rude. But where does all that money go with a very small team?
Not rude at all—We have a stacked dev team with awesome artists, designers, engineers, producers, QA, and more—I was referring to our non-developers. There’s just a few of us and we all wear many hats.
I just want to say that, despite life getting in the way of me getting to play more than 10 games during the open beta, I cannot wait to play some more if I get a key in the next wave or upon early access release.
Game felt good to control and it was fun to play.
We are also opening up late Kickstarter pledges via GameFound soon—hoping for this Friday.
They ignore the IO shield and realize they had to put it in before installing the motherboard.
I feel attacked.
We typically send out a subscriber newsletter, but it’s been a very busy couple months with a lot of major happenings taking place for Stormgate.
We had The Game Awards, Kickstarter, our DreamHack Atlanta Showmatch, Steam Next Fest, The Elephant Beta, EGC Stormgate Open, Late pledges coming soon, StartEngine…and that’s not even including the road ahead to our summer Early Access release and various activities we haven’t announced yet.
We’re bringing on new voice talent, an awesome friend and former colleague has recently started helping us on the game, we have a cool Stormgate side project in the works with a board game partner, and we have lore reveals to share including a short story—it’s a lot!
So yes—we’re due for another newsletter. They’re fun to produce, but they take time. Subscribe at playstormgate.com and we’ll deliver the latest to your inbox as soon as we can.
That's incredible! Not knocking your choices there, just trying to defend you. I've done startups before so I know how it goes. People on Reddit are grossly misinformed and definitely a vocal minority, but the reaction here is probably why many companies aren't so transparent. FWIW I appreciate all the work FGS puts in and I wish you all the best in making SG a success.
Thanks a lot for your support! We are indebted to all of the supporters who have come out to help make Frost Giant’s vision a reality in so many ways.
I can’t stop playing and thinking about Stormgate. I haven’t had this feeling since I was a kid, and I’m almost 36. Can’t wait for more.
Glad you’re having fun! Thanks for being a part of our journey.
A roadmap sounds really sweet! You've made my day today, Gerald. Twice :)
<3
I appreciate you sharing your perspective.
This is more of a case of Gerald wearing many hats and not a dedicated marketing budget. I don't think that statement is controversial. Obviously they spent money on EGC and Simu Liu interview, but it's believable as a one off expense from overall development budget.
If Gerald was also doing all the legal paperwork on the side would you say half his salary is the "legal team budget"? Maybe you can argue what is technically true, but I don't think it's cause to say that "no marketing budget" is disingenuous.
The overall point they're trying to get across is that they're running pretty lean, which I'm not sure is true, but for reasons other than the "marketing budget".
To clarify: We did not spend anything on the Stormgate Open—that was completely funded by EGC.
We did not spend on content creators—every stream and video you’ve seen has been 100% organic and unpaid, including the big name streamers, all scheduled thanks to genuine enthusiasm or interest.
Simu Liu is a Marvel superstar and was just in Barbie. He is in Stormgate because of his authentic passion for RTS, just watch his interview. He’s not in our game for a paycheck and we are grateful for his generous support. (You should have seen the showmatch he played in our studio during his visit—he’s a very high level player.)
Read moreWhat is Stormgate's business plans for the next 3 years? If the game is free-to-play do they expect to make their money back on skins and other in game purchases? RTS games don't really seem like they make sense when it comes to microtransations. Maybe this one could be different successful at them.
DOTA 2 Esport are primarily crowdfunded through a type of in-game "Battle Pass" I think something like this could be really successfully in Stormgate. This could carry over what they did in SC2 with popular player portraits, skins, announcer packs, etc. This could create a lot of community hype and COULD be an additional income stream for players/creators. (Stormgate would get a large cut of course) Also, maybe a virtual "Sports Betting" thing in game could be interesting - I'm thinking with virtual currency not real $.
How is Stormgate innovating not only in gameplay and a new RTS game but in the marketplace? Will it just be another game on Steam or is going to ha...
Our team led the transition of SC2 from a box model to F2P—so we have some experience and data here. It not only doubled the audience, but the monetization model was effective and the game was self-sustaining. We’re using that as a baseline for our approach with Stormgate as it’s proven, while also exploring new opportunities like cosmetic Pets.
We aim to also release something like the SC2 War Chest, as that did well.
We plan to explore other monetization options in the future (artists who would normally dedicate significant time to cosmetics are focused on building our core game), though we will require that they don’t compromise the competitive integrity of the game.
Will the initial early access be "complete" in the sense that we have 3 factions with 3 tiers of units?
Appreciate all the honesty you guys have been showing, even after a miscommunication, thanks for keeping us in the know.
We are planning to release a road map with a rough timeline for when we plan to introduce new content. Please bear with us as we are a very small team.
(Three factions have been confirmed for Day 1 of Early Access. Will look into what the schedule looks like for Tier 3 for inclusion in the road map.)
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It’s funny that they have a social media guy and a kickstarter campaign but continue to say they have no marketing budget.
Hi! I personally handle all the media relations, socials, community, and other duties here. Yes, those activities can contribute to marketing a game, but we don’t have in-house dedicated Marketing staff.
We’re a very lean team—you can count the number of non-developers at Frost Giant on one hand.
Thank you for this. I’d like to add that our StartEngine offering is a Reg CF and is open to accredited and non-accredited investors. You do not need to make $200K/year.
NO MONEY OR OTHER CONSIDERATION IS BEING SOLICITED, AND IF SENT IN RESPONSE, WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. NO OFFER TO BUY THE SECURITIES CAN BE ACCEPTED AND NO PART OF THE PURCHASE PRICE CAN BE RECEIVED UNTIL THE OFFERING STATEMENT IS FILED AND ONLY THROUGH AN INTERMEDIARY’S PLATFORM. AN INDICATION OF INTEREST INVOLVES NO OBLIGATION OR COMMITMENT OF ANY KIND. "RESERVING" SECURITIES IS SIMPLY AN INDICATION OF INTEREST.
You can find my original post .... where I confirmed "funded to our Early Access release"
Gerald, I am seriously wishing you and all Frost Giant the best. I also am not a communications director and will always default to giving you the benefit of the doubt.
With that disclaimer, I do think you've missed an opportunity here. The kickstarter page says "Stormgate is fully funded to release". I would hope that you can see how this would be confusing and perhaps frustrating to the community. I'm glad that you are clarifying things now, but this seems to me to also be an opportunity to at least acknowledge our feelings and confusion. Perhaps even to apologize. I think simply pointing to your previous reddit post has the appearance of you saying, "Hey it's not us who messed up, it's you guys who should've read reddit more carefully!". I don't think that's truly what you believe, but the optics matter here.
GLHF Gerald. Still rooting for ...
100%—your feelings and confusion are valid and we should have been more clear. Our declared intent to launch to Early Access was meant to convey that the initial release and the start of monetization would fund ongoing development (for Stormgate to be self-sustainable). We should have been more clear about the Early Access business model and why we were going this route. Our intent was not to mislead and I’m personally sorry about any confusion.