Frost Giant Studios CEO and production director, Tim Morten, has warned the indie studio might need to contract to survive after its debut project, Stormgate, underperformed.
Industry veteran Morten, who previously managed production on the StarCraft franchise at Blizzard before leaving to establish Frost Giant Studios in 2020, spoke to Game Developer at Gamescom 2025 and confirmed Stormgate is seriously struggling after exiting early access on Steam.
In a candid conversation about the current state of play, Morten said Stormgate peaked at around 1,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch—which is significantly less than the 5,000 it managed to hit during early access.
“We’re at 20 percent of what we saw during early access, and that is not a sustainable place for us to be. So either we find a partner or we have get smaller,” he said
Discussing what that partnership might take shape, Morten was adamant the foundational elements of Stormgate show clear potential and said the studio could leverage its tools and experience to give partners interested in building RTS games a “huge head start.”
“There are some big IPs that would make a lot of sense to turn into an RTS, so there are a lot of conversations for us to have as a studio around that. The second clear area of opportunity for us is user-generated content (UGC),” he explained.
“RTS has such a rich history of UGC and already with the first early release of our (UCG) tool there has been a tremendous amount of activity and creativity evident from the community. There are a variety of partners who I think could really help us capitalize and double down on that. But I think it’s fair to say the future for Frost Giant and the future for Stormgate really depends on us finding a good partner, otherwise we will have no choice but to contract.”
It’s an ominous statement, not least because Frost Giant currently has 48 employees on its books. Morten said the scale of those layoffs will depend on how much revenue the studio manages to generate, but confirmed Stormgate isn’t delivering a “large” return at the moment.
Frost Giant Studios struggles to realize vision for Stormgate after raising almost $40 million
Frost Giant has raised just under $40 million in funding since breaking cover in 2020, and we asked Morten where that investment has been spent.
“Far and away the single biggest spend is the cost of the developers who build the game. That dwarfs anything,” he said. “I think people like to talk about making a single cut scene, or people like to talk about having celebrities in the game, but those costs are nothing compared to the cost of headcount over a half a decade period of the game.
“The budget that we raised at $40 million is a tiny fraction of what it would cost to build a new StarCraft inside Blizzard today. I don’t know the numbers that it cost to build Age of Empires recently or any of the other big publisher releases, but I’m very confident that it is higher than what we spent on Stormgate. I think people hear a number like $40 million and think, ‘wow, that’s so much money,’ but the truth is, to build games of this scope and this quality requires more money.”
Morten confirmed Frost Giant stuck to budget on Stormgate but says he would have liked to raise additional funds because his vision for the project was (and indeed remains) so large. He believes that in a world where Frost Giant had been able to raise capital against its vision a different outcome would have been likely, but acknowledges that in the current climate indie developers must keep a “tight focus.”
“We had to face constricting capital,” he continued. “We had to face fragmentation and player attention in unheard of numbers of games being launched on Steam year on year. We’re in a place now where really excellent games like Wildgate from [publisher] DreamHaven and Supervive from TheoryCraft—which are getting high review scores and are delivering fantastic gameplay to players—are not achieving the scale that I would expect.”
Morten claimed there are still opportunities for indie developers—but they might need to look towards new frontiers in order to make ends meet.
“There are still opportunities [for indies]. They’re just different opportunities. What I see in the market today is that very small teams with very low cost who focus on a tight vision and differentiation, they can still succeed,” he added.
“I think UGC is exploding, particularly Roblox but also UEFN and even platforms like CurseForge and mod.io. I think there are some exciting opportunities there. Then I think the companies that have evergreen franchises and therefore a stable base of revenue will to continue to try to innovate farm will continue to make exciting games. But to me, those are clear opportunities—and then there’s this AI wild card that all of us trying to figure out.”
We’ll have more from Morten on that rather divisive subject at a later date.
Game Developer attended Gamescom 2025 via the Gamescom Media Ambassador Program, which covered flights and accommodation.
