Stormgate, the Warcraft-inspired real-time strategy game from Frost Giant Studios that started with incredible potential after an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign has just hit a major bump in a road that’s been littered with bumps since it launched back in August 2025. The game will be losing its online multiplayer modes, simply because it is losing its server orchestration partner, Hathora, after Hathora was acquired by an AI-focused company, Fireworks AI.
There are already examples of AI and, more specifically, Generative AI (GenAI) taking jobs from developers, but this is seemingly the first example of AI/GenAI taking games (or at least game modes) away from players.
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First reported by Delisted Games, developer Frost Giant Studios shared a message in its Stormgate Discord server, telling its community that it will no longer be able to run servers for Stormgate’s online modes, because those servers are being repurposed to serve the needs of Hathora’s new parent company.
“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,” Frost Giant begins. “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.”
The studio adds that it is hopeful it can bring the game’s online modes back in a future update, but it would first have to find another server orchestration partner to host those matches.
We’ve already seen the AI/GenAI industry drive up the cost of memory and cause a crisis across the tech industry, we’ve seen it drive major shifts in the stock market for video game companies (even if those shifts were based on false beliefs), we’ve seen it take jobs from developers as previously mentioned, and we’ve seen it cause controversy after controversy among game developers and players.
Now, its insatiable need for servers has forced a game to do away with its online modes for the time being, and interestingly, Stormgate seemingly isn’t the only game impacted by this. A report from Silicon Angle also identifies that Hathora ran servers for Splitgate 2 and Predecessor, on top of Stormgate.
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