Stormgate rushing offline mode after losing server access to an AI company
Frost Giant Studios, developers of the always-online strategy game Stormgate, are rushing to patch in an offline mode after a sudden rug pull from its multiplayer provider.
As spotted by Delisted Games, the team announced the news via its official Discord server. Hathora, the game's server orchestration partner, has been purchased by an AI company. As a result, Hathora is winding down its service at the end of April.
The move will result in a planned outage for Stormgate's multiplayer modes. At time of writing, Frost Giant is working on a patch so said modes can be played offline, but future online plans are dicey.
"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," the Discord announcement reads.
"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 winds down."
According to the Hathora site, the company was acquired by Fireworks AI after four years powering server infrastructure for games like Stormgate, Splitgate 2, and Predecessor. Most recently, Hathora expanded into "real-time AI workloads with our voice model marketplace."
Now, under Fireworks AI, Hathora will work on "compute orchestration for AI inference at scale." Moreover, the company says that support for its "gaming customers" will continue through May 5.
Back in September of last year, Tim Morten, CEO of Frost Giant and former StarCraft production director, said he believes generative AI tools can become a force for good in the video game industry. Under his leadership, the studio used external genAI tools to animate character portraits. The explanation, according to Morten, is that the studio "simply didn't have the bandwidth" to do that work without AI, and said most players were "fine" with that call, while also acknowledging some have vocally opposed it.
"We tested with the AI [portraits]. We tested without them," he said at the time. "We really felt that having the characters' faces animate when that dialogue is playing added to the game, and felt that was the better choice than not having it."
As a technology, genAI has garnered a largely negative reception from developers in recent years, with many arguing that it is having a corrosive effect on the industry. During the past week, Crimson Desert developer Peal Abyss apologized to players for failing to disclose the use of genAI during production. Meanwhile, companies like Owlcat and Capcom are touting the use of the tech as a way to iterate faster and speed up production in their projects, respectively.
