Steam game loses multiplayer after AI company abandons servers

Stormgate, a game made by former StarCraft 2 developers, aimed to “boldly advance” real-time strategy games by lowering the barrier to entry in an otherwise inaccessible genre. Three years after its release into early access, however, Stormgate is being pulled offline. Unlike most games facing a potential shutdown, Stormgate‘s shift has nothing to do with success or player count. Instead, it’s the result of a server provider being taken over by an AI company that doesn’t want to share its resources.

As Delisted Games reported, developer Frost Giant Studios announced the news via Discord in late March.

“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,” the bulletin reads. Hathora also powers server infrastructure for other games, like Splitgate 2 — but currently, those services are frozen. After 90 days, the server platforms will be pulled permanently, Hathora says.

Stormgate is a free-to-play strategy game that was once described by Rock Paper Shotgun as the lovechild of StarCraft and Warcraft, with an emphasis on the type of flashy, Blizzard-like storytelling. A Kickstarter campaign for the project quickly raised over $2.3 million back in 2023, so the anticipation behind it was high. Once it was actually playable, however, Stormgate received mixed reviews on Steam. While some fans appreciated that the developers took feedback seriously, others believed that the experience resembled StarCraft a little too much. But even players who reviewed it positively agreed that Stormgate did not live up to its promised hype.

Hathora has been acquired by Fireworks AI, a company started by people who formerly worked in Meta’s AI division. Fireworks AI serves 10,000 customers with functions like AI-led code assistance, agentic systems, and conversational bots. But as AI usage proliferates, so has the demand for computing power. Those calculations rely on network and cloud services such as Hathora’s to actually process all the data.

Stormgate‘s developers say that the game will be patched so that it is playable offline, and that they hope to restore full functionality in another future update. “But this work will be dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations,” the announcement reads.

Regardless of the game’s current quality, Stormgate‘s multiplayer situation is an unusual one. It is also the latest example of AI advances diverting resources from the world of video games. As some gamers know all too well, AI usage has driven up prices for computer chips needed to build PCs and power consoles. Frost Giant’s tentative wording, alongside the ever-growing AI boom, makes it plausible that Stormgate is just the start of another awful trend for the video game industry.