Stormgate is set to go offline-only at the end of April, with developers Frost Giant Studios having announced that the server provider for the strategy game’s multiplayer modes have decided they no longer want to be a server provider for online games. That’s a byproduct of said provider, Hathora, having been taken over by an AI company who plan on using their latest purchase “to work on compute orchestration for AI inference at scale”.
As spotted by the folks over at Delisted Games, Frost Giant announced the news on Stormgate’s official Discord server yesterday.
“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,” they wrote. “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.
“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 servers wind down,” they concluded.
Wandering over to Hathora’s website, there’s currently a banner on the homepage which declares that the server providers have been acquired by a company called Fireworks AI and are “discontinuing [their] service for game companies”, with support set to shut down in 90 days. Hathora note they’ve selected Nitrado’s GameFabric server hosting infrastructure as an “exclusive transition partner”, with the exclusive bit of that suggesting this is the only option for existing Hathora-using studios who want to avoid online downtime for their games. As for what Fireworks have decided to put Hathora’s people and resources to work on instead, a post about the acquisition says the company will “work on compute orchestration for AI inference at scale”, whatever that means.
“We powered server infrastructure for live titles like Splitgate 2, Stormgate, and Predecessor, and more recently expanded into real-time AI workloads with our voice model marketplace,” the post continues. “The throughline was always the same: low-latency compute orchestration across heterogeneous infrastructure, without compromising on performance. Fireworks AI is where that work can have the most impact. The team we built at Hathora is obsessed with infrastructure, and at Fireworks, they can continue to do what they do best.”
Given that mention of Splitgate 2 and the customer testimonials section on the gaming page of Hathora’s site including a quote from Ian Proulx, I’ve reached out to 1047 Games to see whether Splitgate: Arena Reloaded’s set to be affected by Hathora getting out of the game server business.
Rick Lane called Stormgate “a potentially good game that makes a poor first impression” in our early access review of the Starcraft-esque RTS. Here’s hoping Frost Giant and any other affected studios can find new providers as quickly as possible.
