Irvine-based developer Frost Giant Studios has smashed the Kickstarter campaign goal for its debut game, the real-time strategy title Stormgate, in less than fifteen minutes. Now that it's been around 14 hours since the campaign went live, the current total of pledges is at $718,996, or 718% over the base goal.
People have another 57 days and a half (until February 1st, 2024) to pledge to the game, so Stormgate could become the biggest Kickstarter game campaign in a long while. While projects have regularly continued to appear on the platform, the heyday of crowdfunding in games is clearly past.
Anyway, Frost Giant Studios was founded a bit over three years ago by former Blizzard developers who worked on classic RTS games like Warcraft III and Starcraft II. Moving away from Blizzard, they said they wanted to do a new real-time strategy game since that wasn't the company's priority anymore (which is still true today).
Stormgate is the result of that. While a spiritual successor to the aforementioned Blizzard classics, it aims to be the next step in the genre's evolution thanks to various technical improvements.
It is powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 5, for starters, but Frost Giant Studios is applying its own tech stack on top of it. The so-called Snowplay technology can render over a thousand units without breaking a sweat and is also the first RTS to include rollback technology, as previously reported. As such, the developers are promising this will be the most responsive real-time strategy game ever made (3x more than Starcraft II).
Stormgate will be free to play when it launches sometime next year on Steam, featuring an extensive feature set: an ongoing campaign (playable in co-op), a dedicated co-op mode called Wreck Havoc for up to three players, 1v1 competitive play with a built-in tournament system, and of course an editor to create custom missions and mini-games.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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