Stormgate, a free-to-play RTS game developed by some former Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 devs, announced that its online multiplayer provider has been bought by an AI company and it will lose access to its servers. This is a problem for Stormgate, as it’s an always-online game. The devs are now working to patch in an offline mode.
On March 31, as reported by Delisted Games, Stormgate developer Frost Giant announced some “unfortunate news” in the game’s official Discord server. According to the studio, which launched Stormgate back in 2024, the game’s “server orchestration partner,” Hathora, has been bought up by an AI company. As speculated by Delisted and others, this likely means that Hathora’s server and computing resources will be applied to supporting AI services instead of online multiplayer. It’s fun to learn about a new way in which AI is going to ruin everything.
This is bad news for Stormgate as the RTS is an always-online game, and at the end of April, it will no longer be able to connect to servers, which, if things stayed as they are, would prevent players from playing the game completely. Thankfully, Frost Giant says the game will be “patched so that it can be played offline” before that happens. But online multiplayer modes will no longer be available.
“We hope to restore online play in a future patch,” said the devs on Discord. “But this work will be dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations.”
Fans have wanted an offline mode in Stormgate since 2024
The lack of an offline mode has been something the community around Stormgate has complained about for some time now. Frost Giants has claimed in the past that it was planning to add an offline mode, but it just wasn’t a “main focus.” Seems like it has suddenly become a main focus!
“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,” said Frost Giant. “Thank you for your support.”
Kotaku has contacted Frost Giant for more information.
This news is just one more example of why video game companies need to build offline modes into their games, no matter how dedicated they are to supporting a game with updates for years to come. Even if only part of the game remains playable after the servers go down or get ripped away from you by an AI company, some kind of offline mode can keep the game around for years, let you sell it on storefronts long after the servers go offline, and provide the community with a game that could be expanded upon with future mods and fan-created updates. The alternative to not supporting offline at launch is that you have to put the mode together quickly after something like this happens.
