Game to Lose Online Mode After Its Server Partner Pivots to You’ll Never Guess What

It would be disingenuous to call Stormgate a hit game with millions of fans, but you could reasonably say this StarCraft-like real-time strategy game is a work in progress that gamers have been excited to support. In 2023, when it was still in development, the Washington Post made it sound like the potential salvation of the real-time strategy genre.

Early previews looked promising in 2024. Its Kickstarter raised $2,380,701 against a goal of $100,000. Reviews ended up being lukewarm, but PC Gamer says that’s “probably at least in part because some of the game’s core features, including the terrain editor and co-op mode, were still in development.”

At any rate, it looks like the folks at Frost Giant Studios, the developers behind Stormgate, may have a hard time turning things around, and you’ll never guess why.

According to a post from the developers on the Stormgate Discord:

“Our game server orchestration partner, Hathora, has been purchased by an AI company, and they are winding down their service at the end of April. This will create a planned outage for Stormgate’s multiplayer modes.

Stormgate will be patched so that it can be played offline, but online modes will not be available at that point.

We hope to restore online play in a future patch, but this work will be dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations.”

Hathora’s press release about the change, says:

“Today, we’d like to share that Hathora has been acquired by Fireworks AI. Our team will be joining Fireworks to work on compute orchestration for AI inference at scale.

[…] For our gaming customers, support will continue through May 5, 2026, and we’ve partnered with Nitrado’s GameFabric to provide a clear migration path and hands-on support through the transition. We’ve already been in direct contact with our active customers. Details on timing and migration support have been shared directly.”

Frost Giant Studios is apparently not taking up Hathora on the offer to migrate to Nitrado’s GameFabric.

According to Aftermath, Stormgate’s “peak concurrent player count has yet to break 100 this year.”

Gizmodo reached out to Frost Giant Studios for a statement, particularly for details about why it’s not apparently accepting the offer to migrate to Nitrado’s GameFabric. We will update this article if we hear back.