Irvine-based developer Frost Giant Studios has smashed the Kickstarter campaign goal for its debut game, the real-time strategy title Stormgate, in less than fifteen minutes. Now that it's been around 14 hours since the campaign went live, the current total of pledges is at $718,996, or 718% over the base goal.

　　People have another 57 days and a half (until February 1st, 2024) to pledge to the game, so Stormgate could become the biggest Kickstarter game campaign in a long while. While projects have regularly continued to appear on the platform, the heyday of crowdfunding in games is clearly past.

　　Anyway, Frost Giant Studios was founded a bit over three years ago by former Blizzard developers who worked on classic RTS games like Warcraft III and Starcraft II. Moving away from Blizzard, they said they wanted to do a new real-time strategy game since that wasn't the company's priority anymore (which is still true today).

　　Stormgate is the result of that. While a spiritual successor to the aforementioned Blizzard classics, it aims to be the next step in the genre's evolution thanks to various technical improvements.

　　It is powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 5, for starters, but Frost Giant Studios is applying its own tech stack on top of it. The so-called Snowplay technology can render over a thousand units without breaking a sweat and is also the first RTS to include rollback technology, as previously reported. As such, the developers are promising this will be the most responsive real-time strategy game ever made (3x more than Starcraft II).

　　Stormgate will be free to play when it launches sometime next year on Steam, featuring an extensive feature set: an ongoing campaign (playable in co-op), a dedicated co-op mode called Wreck Havoc for up to three players, 1v1 competitive play with a built-in tournament system, and of course an editor to create custom missions and mini-games.