Frost Giant Studios has disabled Stormgate’s online multiplayer modes — Versus and Co-op — as the studio decouples from its server infrastructure. The move is the first concrete step in an offline migration forced by outside circumstances: Stormgate’s game-server orchestration partner, Hathora, was acquired and is winding down its service at the end of April 2026, creating a planned outage for the game’s online modes.

What changed: Versus and Co-op disabled; offline play added as Hathora winds down. Why it matters: Online play returns only via Steam P2P and a new operations partner. Who should care: Stormgate players, especially the 1v1 and 2v2 ladder community.

What changed in this patch

  • Online modes disabled: Versus and Co-op are offline for the time being.
  • Offline support added: Campaign, AI Skirmish, and Custom games no longer require a server connection, and user progress for those modes is persisted locally.
  • Platform decoupling: dependencies on Hathora and the Pragma platform were removed, along with the startup splashes and early-access dialog.
  • P2P is in progress: a Steam peer-to-peer implementation is being built to restore multiplayer, with UGC map downloading planned alongside it. Attempting to join a P2P game currently returns a placeholder error — the netcode is not ready yet.

The studio is explicit that this is a transition, not a shutdown: the intent is to return online play via Steam P2P, and once that lands it “may be possible to bring back an improved version of the versus/coop ladders,” though there are no confirmed plans.

A performance patch riding alongside

Unrelated to the offline transition, the same update ships a roughly 30% performance improvement. Frost Giant optimized systems that were scaling poorly with large unit counts and better limited updates from off-screen components and calculations, so frame rate more closely reflects what is actively on screen — including into the late game, where RTSRTS. Real-Time Strategy — a strategy game where everyone plays at the same time, continuously, instead of taking turns. engines typically buckle.

Two quality-of-life changes target a long-standing RTS pain point — ability casting being interrupted by your own army:

  • Ability push priority: a unit issued an ability command gains temporary pathing priority on approach, so casters stop being shoved around by the army and their abilities fire reliably.
  • Ability non-interrupt: the prepare, cast, and channel stages of abilities are uninterruptible by normal move/attack inputs to prevent accidental cancels (Stop still force-cancels on a homogeneous selection).

A few balance tweaks ship too:

  • Celestial Luminite harvest is retuned to match 10/10 saturation.
  • Charge-based production queues drop from 5 slots to 1.
  • Fiends, Carnivex, and the Energizer Node receive small adjustments.

The structural story

The harder reading is the one Frost Giant states plainly: restoring online play is “dependent on Frost Giant finding a partner to support ongoing operations.” That sentence carries more weight than the patch notes around it. When a live-service game’s backend partner is purchased and sunsetted, the studio is left rebuilding multiplayer from the transport layer up — and for an RTS whose competitive identity is 1v1 and 2v2 ladder, the duration of that outage directly measures how long the competitive scene can hold.

For now, the build that exists is the one players can keep: offline Campaign, AI Skirmish, and Custom games, with a faster engine and kinder ability controls. The open question is how quickly Steam P2P can stand up — and whether a partner materializes to carry the online game forward. The April 30 announcement is the official source for the transition timeline.

The next milestones to watch are the Steam P2P implementation graduating from its placeholder-error state and any word on an operations partner for ladders. Until then, the offline Campaign, AI Skirmish, and Custom build — with the 30% performance uplift riding alongside — is the version players actually live on.

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