Studio Spotlight: Stormgate Early Access Hits Top 10 US Steam charts
Play Stormgate Today on Steam
If you’ve followed Hathora at all, you know how much we adore the team at Frost Giant Studios building Stormgate, a spiritual successor to some of our favorite real-time strategy games. Their team is dynamite and they took an early bet on Hathora for their dedicated servers. Keep reading for an inside look at how Stormgate became a top 10 game on Steam (US) within 24 hours of publicly launching their Early Access Preview.
As you can imagine, we don’t just love writing about these launches, we love talking about them too. If you’ll be in Cologne for Gamescom, we have a few team members in town and we’d love to see you at our Happy Hour on Monday, August 19th and in smaller meetings throughout the week. We’ll be roving around town with a free coffee cart and limited edition collectible Stormgate pins in honor of the Early Access launch. Follow us on LinkedIn to see where that will pop up!
Now, onto the launch itself.
Diving into the Data
In addition to being a top-seller on Steam, Stormgate was also one of the top games on Twitch - reaching a peak of over 32,000 viewers on the first day.
But how did the game hold up to this initial surge of players? The Frost Giant Studios team shared that their services had 98.6% uptime overall! This includes ALL of their many services from live-ops, matchmaking, and of course Hathora’s scalable dedicated servers. We’re sure their successful open beta last Steam Next Fest helped them build confidence towards this launch.
In particular, Hathora also had some notable numbers that we can share:
- A single Stormgate server is able to host hundreds of matches at the same time thanks to the technical prowess behind SnowPlay (Frost Giant’s innovative netcode and gameplay engine) and the way their servers leverage one of Hathora’s advanced platform scheduling features. We pulled the numbers and in the first days of their Early Access Preview Stormgate servers hosted nearly half a million sessions, averaging an incredible 544.31 game sessions per server. Even more mind-boggling, is that 64 of those servers were responsible for hosting over 2,000 game sessions each.
- Matches were scheduled to servers in under 1s on average, across all 10 global regions that were active during Stormgate's launch. If you’re curious to see your ping to those very servers, you can check your ping on the custom-built Stormgate site here.
- Early reflections from online gamers have yielded strong feedback in regions such as Sydney that are able to play at much lower ping compared to other online multiplayer games, vastly improving their in-game experience. Professional gamer Sean Kempen, aka Probe, winner of the recent TastelessTV Stormgate Showdown, shared with us, “As an Australian gamer, latency has always been our greatest hurdle, impacting gameplay and practice. With Stormgate's rollback system and their servers, I have never felt disadvantaged when competing against players from around the globe.” Hard to beat that!
Why did this work?
Frost Giant has been focused on player-driven development from the early days. They ran the most successful video game Kickstarter campaign of last year and have been able to build up an active Discord community of nearly 40,000 passionate gamers. Without their commitment to their community, their recent success would have required a lot more hope, luck, and marketing dollars. We certainly hope to see more self-published games follow Stormgate’s player-focused strategy!
What’s next?
We’ll be celebrating the upcoming free-to-play Early Access launch on August 13th, 2024 at Gamescom from August 19th - 25th. We’ve booked a Stormgate x Hathora coffee cart that will be roving around Cologne. In addition to free coffee, we have a limited edition Stormgate collectible pin for folks who come to the cart and follow Hathora on LinkedIn. Follow along so you can see where the cart will be stationed during the conference.
Hathora continues to monitor the game while it is in action, and we coordinate closely with the Stormgate team to ensure any hiccups are addressed proactively to minimize player inconvenience.
This is just the beginning of Hathora’s “summer of launches,” and we invite you to follow along on LinkedIn and this blog to learn more details about how each of these was achieved.
If you’ll be in Cologne for Gamescom, please join our Backend Services House. If you’re not there, join our Discord and make an account to see the power of our platform.
