A valuation of 150M means the following: during the last capital investment round, the investors gave 25M and received 16.67% of total equity of Frost Giant. In other words, 25M for 16.67% corresponds to 150M for 100% of equity. The Kickstarter round was not about investment into equity - it was collecting donations in exchange for promise to deliver certain goods/services. Now Frost Giant offers individual supporters to become part of the company's financial success (or failure).

18:00 Also note that Larian Studios has had 3 successful early access games prior to Baldur's Gate 3, they have a good track record and Frostgiant atm has none.

The game's graphics are a big turn off and are very confusing. I watched pro gamers play and I watched a tournament and honestly wasn't impressed. I have much more fun watching WC3 and SC2, they seem way more polished in terms of strategies, timing attacks, counters ; and they also have that little "je ne sais quoi" that just clicks everything together and makes it fun. Stormgate is confusion, bland and ultimately boring. By reading several comments from other viewers, I'm not alone. I feel like this game is doomed, just like an MMO going against World of Warcraft in the first 5 years after WoW's released, claiming they were "WoW killers".

I am quite skeptical of the business model of Stormgate. Being free to play and RTS not attracting a big audience, how are they going to get the revenue? I understand they will get some, but to recover a more than 25 M$ investment.... I don't know. I don't see it.

"Being Ex-Blizzard no longer matters to me" Grubby throwing flak holy moly. Personally speaking, I think the communication about the whole thing has been not the best. It's ok if different terms were used and there was confusion because of that, but more communication from Frost Giant about what they meant, and where they are now, would be appreciated in the next few days. I certainly remain hopeful for Stormgate as a whole, though.

Yeah I agree the art style is probably the most labor intensive thing in modern day game development, and it’s probably not gonna to change much of as of now, they may polish up animations and shaders and particle effects, but a complete overhaul would take a huge amount of time to do, in terms of the overall design of the art itself, I think the big problem is it looks a bit to similar to every other RTS out there it’s very safe in its design choices, as well as gameplay wise it’s all very safe and doesn’t do anything new or innovative to push the RTS genre forward. I haven’t actually played the game yet so I’m waiting till i get a hands on with it before I completely judge it, this is all just based on what I can see and watching people play the game, and what they said about it.

Not that I know much about marketing, it seems though, that they've got quite a lot of community awareness already - the best marketing from this point would be finishing the game and addressing some of the concerns that came out of the beta, in my opinion.

The fact that they exceeded their own crowdfunding goal by over 20 times the amount only to turn around so quickly afterwards to ask for more money from the public is a bit of a red flag. I also just don't see much interest in terms of view count on Stormgate related videos and media. For a brand new RTS IP that's being hyped by content creators, there seems to be a general sense of malaise and indifference from your average gamer looking into it. Also, having an indie startup studio based in Irvine, California (one of the most expensive places to be in North America) doesn't exactly scream "indie company that's funneling all their resources into making the game the best it can be" to me. I dunno, hard pass on investing in this thing.

It's wild to me that Stormgate got all of that funding and they're still saying they need more money, meanwhile Godsworn was made by 2 people on a shoestring budget but somehow looks, sounds, and plays a lot better.

I gotta be honest.... nothing I've seen about this game has impressed me. We had big hopes considering the names involved...... but it looks like they were one hit wonders.

My two cents which im sure no one gives a fk about. All I personally atm see with stormgate is a lot of the warning signs we should be noticing for blizzard. funding requests after funding requests, not having the beta be open for the longest time, having "pro tournaments" to display the game, not listening to the community on changes, really making the same product thats been made for the last 20 years. I again am a big fan of sc2 and even tho I came into it late originally i played C&C3 so I certainly understand playing these back in their prime to an extent. But if we take a moment to go back in time when sc and sc2 released they were so new, innovative, something you couldn't find anywhere else. When i look at stormgate, what is truly "New" after you get past the fresh coat of paint. It's literally just the same game over the past 20 years, no supply cap increase, no larger maps, no bigger armies, no more unique and advanced units, no difference races that have extreme specializations. I don't have all the answers or honestly a perfect solution but adding a bunch of new and exciting things would make it much more appealing.

To "Why there were no additional investments from the bigger companies that have invested in the past?" - these companies are professional venture capital investors and they are looking for a vast portfolio of investments into hundreds or thousands of different projects. Their goal is to diversify the risks. If out of 100 projects 99 would fail and one is highly successful, the earnings from that single project may compensate the costs of all 100 investments altogether. This implies that providing money more than once to the same project, while it may increase the probability of project success, may as well go against the broader goal of investment diversification.

I'm starting to see now how key Samwise Didier was to both War3 and Sc2 unit readability. The guy is an artistic genius. The concept and everything he draws really fits well in the RTS space. The reason why the look of Reforged was a miss among other things is that Didier ( who was still at the company as art director when they did Reforged) by some abnormal amount of stupidity wasn't in charge of the art and visuals direction of the project. I'm sure that he would have gladly done it if someone at the company had a brain to ask him, he draws Warcraft related stuff all the time and puts it on Instagram etc. If he ever decides to do a RTS game again you can be sure it will be a banger when it comes to the visuals of the game.

Not super suprised after the beta, it seems like they forgot the casual playerbase, and have now realised they wont make enough money on the more "hardcore" playerbase. A healthy game requires a healthy casual playerbase, that's where alot of the money is.

A weird thing about the art for me is that it looks significantly better up close. The units and buildings look very good when watching full screen behind your monitor. If you look at it from a bit further, a telivision for example, the art plumits in quality. Also, the art can get a bit messy when the units are in large groups.

What’s weird is if you calculate the amount of employees average at 100k per person over 5years, they should have double the amount of funding. There’s indie dev teams of 2-3people who create insanely well made and polished games in 3-4years and these guys have 10-20times that amount of developers working on a basic clone of StarCraft. I’m a little worried :)

They got some total $40 million and they're developing using Unreal Engine anyway, right? Literally everything about this game just worries me at this point. I'm avoiding clicking on their videos and posts; I need to see some good-faith delivery before I can reassert my interest. =/

There were no more corporate investors, because we have inflation and economic stagnation for almost 2 Years. The investment landscape changed a lot, especially in the gaming business. It's at least once a month we hear a gaming studio cutting employers because of overinvesting in the past. The bubble is real.

They stated they already had enough $$ for a full release prior to the kickstarter, which they received $2.4 mil. This is just cringe at this point.

Tried it and was massively disappointed. I was expecting something more in line with W3, not SC2... Also the characters on loading screens/menu are just bland and uninspired. SC2 and W3 are successful not just because of pro players but because of the casuals that love the story and cool characters.

I'm starting to get the feeling that these "ex-Blizzard" dev's in this project weren't the A-team responsible for Warcraft 3 and Starcraft's success.

ZeroSpace is currently the better game, both in artstyle and mechanics. Lets see if StormGate can use their deep pockets to change that. I personally really hope ZeroSpace is here to stay tho!

I hope this game succeeds. Based on what the game visually up until this point I think it’s pretty ugly. Lighting/shaders aside, there isn’t much personality to the units and buildings. This is most evident with the human race where I can’t help but most units look very generic. Just the sight of the lancers make me fall asleep. I don’t get cohesions with B.O.B. with a child cartoon design, a robot dog, and just the whole thing. Maybe I’m crazy and part of some minority where people do like the look of it. There’s a lot of time between here and release so I hope there is some overhauls visually

I work as a Dev for a gaming studio, and have sat in playtests with Tencent and many others looking for investments. Our studio went from having tons of investment opportunities to zero in the span of a year. The explanation given to us has been that interest rates are so high, that these big companies get higher and safer returns from having their money sit in more traditional investments, and are basically not investing currently.

As a professional game developer, i must say that thats a lot of funding for development for such a small studio.

There is no scenario in which people should be expected to interpret "fully funded until release" as being the "early access release." If they need more money to complete the release of the game, then they deceived their investors on the kickstarter page, simple as that. Every single game that I heard was releasing in early access made that abundantly clear.

so far this game to struggle to even compete with how good sc2 was, yes sc2 had its issues but at the end of the day it was a great game brought down mostly by deathballing. almost every game i've seen from stormgate has been a massive deathball which is a design issue that can't really be solved sadly hoping they do well and release a game more similar to wc3 or like broodwar where units didn't just clump together

It just looks and feels meh at best. Talent left Blizzard many years ago

my biggest complaint about this game is the art. Won't go into details, but it's just bad, and factions don't feel like they have a personality, and a lot of units (like the marine) look like they're made out of plastic. What I'm hoping is, if the game is successful, they'll have enough money to pay actual artists to make good models someday...

When are people just going to stop backing things on kickstarter? Why has this become the standard ? People get mad they dont get complete products at launch and now people are paying for thing BEFORE they are even created. You don't own a part of the company by giving money on Kickstarter.

Thank you for making this video, Grubby. This needed to be done. Wish I could plaster it all over the subreddit.

Ayy Grubby liked FTL soundtrack

The game looks flat out worse than Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty, they've had $35 million in investment already and they want more.....Not a chance

I am so glad I cancelled my backing of this.

This is looking like a retirement scheme for a few EX blizz staff where they cash in their ex blizz goodwill and retire. I'm honestly far from impressed with what the game has shown so far. So many years and so much money poured into it, and it still looks like quite the amateur product with little polish.

OMG, the amount of money they have burned is insane for a new company, they NEED to be more efficient.

i love it that now if I want to support a game i have to conduct investigation of its funding (including the forms of funding as well as companies involved), assess the possibility of fraud, financial health and structure, projected profitability, Total Addressable Market of the game, long term monetisation and marketing strategy. That's EXACTLY why i'm into games.

Zerospace looks more promising than stormgate to me, with way less money. This let me think stormgate will be a huge disappointment.

great breakdown and investigation -- I'm familiar with all of these funding methods but didn't know this timeline and that stormgate was VC backed and is selling equity.

I can't stop tying the company to Day9's Mom in good faith.

Lol. You only need to look at the input Vs outputs of Stormgate Vs Godsworn. Imagine what those 2 dudes could have done with Frost Giants warchest. The contrast really puts the "investments" into perspective

The early access launch is not going to go well if they don't even have tier 3 and how many coop missions can we expect to have? And of course artstyle is important, that's where a lot of microtransaction will happen. I have always felt a lot of the hype was manufactured, just so they can fit in that AAA budget. This being a free to play is going to be extremely risky ahead. I definitely wouldn't recommend anyone to drop money in. And I am glad grubby you gave out some thoughts because it's like all influencers (?) are not talking about this, most likely balancing their own reputation and relationship with stormgate community/company. ZG had been pretty direct about SG long time ago, she's another one that didn't just go SG good and looking forward to seeing more. Big respect to you both

I was looking forward to this game but Helldivers 2 shows us that we DO NOT NEED TO PAY OVER $40 FOR AN AMAZING GAME

no one has been factoring in the costs of rent for the office space, developer salaries, cloud costs, and future UE engine rev-share (i think that's the model EPIC works off of). Cloud costs can climb incredibly fast depending on what services are being leveraged. I don't know what office space runs in their location but it's probably not cheap at all (at minimum 5-10m/yr) obviously good engineers are going to be expensive as well including salary, benefits & equity

Stretch goals are continually added over the course of a successful Kickstarter campaign. You can't use the fact that the final funding amount was roughly equal to the stretch goals as a measure of the funding being up to expectations.

Reg CF is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to allow non accredited investors to gain access to ownership in private equity shares. The reason you see “reserves” and not “funds committed” is the company cannot “sell” the shares until the entire offering is reserved. The big difference between Reg CF and regular kickstarters is that the contribution to a Reg CF actually provides receipt of restricted shares through the SPV and is subject to regulatory scrutiny

Ive been a bit weird about this project since they started doing kickstarter. Not to say theyre going to deliver an minimum viable product for investors and run away with all the cash, but considering the state of the open beta I wouldnt be surprised

You said a few times never invested in this way. So i assume it means you did or do invest?

they did youtube promotion, second wind has some ads

Considering how much they got on Kickstarter, this is kinda weird no? Like my personal opinion of SG after playing the demo during NextFest is it is mid at best or "Starcraft 2 at home". IMO they've not done enough to carve their own identity despite how much I am positive people want SC3, I still think they need to do more. That said, them asking for people to invest like this in context of the massive funds raised via Kickstarter... do FrostGiant feel less confident in the project? Do more people feel the same as I do about the game after the demo? (I don't really make an effort to find out how others feel after deciding the game is not for me) or am I looking into this too much? Guess we will find out but.. I've got a bad feeling about this...

Triple dipping funding! Should have called it "Storm Citizen".

It's incredible to me how weak Stormgate is on so many levels when you consider how much has been invested already. It tells me they are incredibly inefficient with their money. Combine that with the amount of work they still need to do to actually get this game to a good level and this looks like a dead project to me.

Ugh, now they're talking about using ChatGPT to have open ended conversations with the mission briefing NPCs.

Fun fact: the executive team at Frost Giant (Tim Morten, Tim Campbell and Cara LaForge) were collectively involved in 4 separate failed game startups prior to this. 2 of them were in the RTS genre.

Imagine paying now for an physcial copy that might come out in several years, yeah, dont do that.

pretty sad to see the response and them not really own up to what they did and clearly did on purpose. I get it yes budget shortcomings can be unclear until they appear, but either this was intentionally worded this way to generate revenue or they should not be making games with whoever is on the finance team. Pretty sure only one of these is plausible; guess you can really tell they worked at blizzard.

This is why I don't back early access. I'll buy it on release and so far, the game itself doesn't look good enough for me to buy even on release.

I'm in the camp saying this game won't go anywhere. 'Fail' is a bit loaded so who knows about that, maybe it makes its money back. I just don't think the game is going to blow up and be the next 'big' thing. I think it's going to release to a relatively small audience, be enjoyed for a few months and be left with only a hardcore crowd. For me there's two big things holding it back, one is the art style and two is the lack of hype around RTS right now.

IMO the game so far is just way to similar to SC2. I think what makes SC2 so hard is the fact that you kinda have to get multiple bases. Whenever someone goes 1 base (in sc2 and I expect it will be the same in SG) its kind of a unicorn and thats exactly what makes is so hard for casuals to get into the game. Managing 1 base with resources, buildorders and terrain is enough for the vast majority of players.

Prob just that they realized there was no more corpo funding so they are trying to get the biggest marketing budget they can. There is a putty strong correlation between success in sales and marketing not so much how good the game is.

One thing i like about you, Grubby, is your steadfast ownage of "that guy" who comes in all high and mighty pretending the community are a bunch of hysterical headless chickens and he's the voice of reason with authority whilst actually not saying anything of content or rebutting anything.. That sort of archetype tends to be pretty popular on reddit. But you Grub, you dont fall for these grandstanding shit stirrers.

Didn't they ask for money to start developing in the firstplace? How many times can you do the same trick?

Grubby thank you for having a balanced mindset! We all want Stormgate to succeed. I know I was excited before we even knew the name Frost Giant, then before we even knew the name Stormgate! If this is another perpetually unfinished kickstarter game it will set RTS back many years. Hopefully all this funding stuff leads to more transparency, which leads to more trust & feedback, then therefore a better and a finished game.

Thanks for raising awareness, let us hope that they are able to release a really good rts but i could not offer funding under these circumstances even if i had the disposable income.

the theme of the factions is fleshed out

@ 12:50: dilution of the reserve shares is usually why. If Frost Giant cannot afford the equity ask of the PE firm, using a SPV for a private placement is more favorable for Frost Giant while providing an opportunity to the public for those who would otherwise have to wait for an overvalued IPO (initial public offering)

Great video, I love how well researched, naunced, and thoughtful this talk was. For the question of 150mil valuation vs 47mil investment, as an investor you don't buy 100% of the company/revenue. You buy a portion of stock/part of the company. So if that 47million bought 33% of stock (and therefore 33% of the company) then frostgiant would be valued at 150million (47 multiplied by ~3). There are some investment sites that show some of this information but its often paywalled. At least to me the ~3x investment to valuation ratio seems very reasonable without finding the exact numbers.

With how much you know now of how Blizzard operated, calling yourself "ex blizzard" is actually derogatory.

Dust Front... Ladies & Gentlemen; *_Art Style_*

I think from a dev point of view, early access and finished game are pretty much exactly the same, considering how much work it takes to get to early access, the difference is just polishing. As soon as the cash shop is available (I guarantee it will be in active in early access) the game is released.

Respect for doing a video on this. Seems many of the old influencers pumping out stormgate content don't seem to want to touch it. Wonder why. All that aside I love your review videos on new games ❤

massive red flags

I am sure that the kickstarter people will get their physical collectors edition copies of the Early Access game after all that's what they paid for right ?

The disclosure of the same investors for the first 3 rounds of funding is more than likely from a “pro rata” rights clause that allows seed investors first right of refusal in later funding rounds to maintain current equity stake. This means the early investors are offered the ability to buy in again to maintain their percentage ownership in the company. If they refuse, their ownership position is diluted from the additional funding and new share issuance.

Great video, I hope it works out for them and the investment goes well. It is a little bit curious to what is happening but without any real understanding or them giving away what's happening it's hard to know. In terms of gameplay, I did find myself enjoying it, I wanted to play more and it was easy to get into as someone who isn't super serious at RTS but likes starcraft and starcraft 2 and couldn't get into AoE4 because of how overwhelming the UI and everythin on the screen was especially as a left handed player. I think it's 2 things, early acess means people can play properly and apart from a wipe and future content it's essentially in live development and starting it's journey as a live service game. I work as a graphic designer and animator and people get confused about artstyle and graphics, the artstyle is good in Stormgate and so is the visual language but people are caught up in the graphcs. They can apply a lighting pass to the game, as well as updating the visual fidelity of the units and map closer to the end and with more animations and visual clarity in the way things move / portraits moving that will transform the game a lot as that's what is missing right now but it's understandable due to where they are in development. I'm working on a competitive puzzle vs fighting game, think puyo puyo and puzzle fighter / magical drop, highly competitive chain strategy and characters with abilities and meter management. We started development 2 years ago and we wanted help from the puzzle community to help get the core gameplay loop down because that's the most important thing with the game, essentially what stormgate is doing because it's the quickest way to iterate on the gameplay and get the results the fastest by having a large sample size of feedback. In our game we showed off the dev build, which just had blocks, no backgrounds, not much sound, no characters and the meter system missing but we still wanted players to give us feedback on the core fundamentals of the games design. Granted multiplayer puzzle games are a far cry way way way smaller than making an RTS, we got it in front of people really early when dev text was on the field and that allowed us to really hone in the gameplay. How our chaining system works, what's the defensive and offensive system like, do players have freedom of expression to build the way they want and what are the win conditions. we later polished the graphics, adding the characters, the menu's, the special abilities, particles, a polished field for players to play on, alternate skin pieces and sound and music. But it was so valuable for us to get it in the hands of really skilled puzzle players in the community to hone in on the core gameplay and then we kept updating the graphics and animations and game modes. Basically the same thing Stormgate is doing and you definitely can do a final pass on the game to improve the graphics here for sure! It's so valuable to get into the minds of players because it helps confirm your ideas are correct allowing you to focus on the art and everything else in the package once everything else is done and then you can market and our game looks way better than before now it's in a state that's quite visual for fans. Again it's a little bit scary about their funding purposes and I hope it's all good, but I think the combination of a lot of the community not understanding this style of agile development is one thing and as you say and since I've played it, the gameplay is quite fun and we hope it continues to get better over time. You can't please everyone and a lot of these people don't really understand how to critically understand the connection of colour palette and shapes, iconography and the thematics of the races visual language vs the raw graphics you see in front of you because of the current state it is in. Anyway thanks for making this video, it really helped me get into words the process my small team of 4 are going through which is similar to what Frost Giant are trying to achieve from a gameplay point of a view of course.

@ 9 minutes: many companies set the kickstarter pledge goal very low and will scale deliverables based on the user base commitment. This is a low risk way to the company to be able to promise and not underdeliver. Wording in the prospectus (this disclosures to the investor or donator) has to be carefully considered for legal reasons.

Just so you know, me writing this comment, and thereby increasing the algorythm's likelyhood of promoting your video, has cost me billable minutes. I expect to be compensated. Another video release will do.

Riot games is a US based developer. Tencent is a shareholder. They own 100% of shares, but at the end of the day...that's all they are, shareholders. Riot is still a unique entity. It's not quite the same thing as say, Activision fully buying the company of Blizzard from Vivendi. They have also joined multiple other large companies in making cuts this year. I suspect they were originally going to provide more funding to this project and had to back out of it when they also cut back on a lot of their own projects.

they go 40M$ from initial funding and kickstarter and I have heard also they asked money to add heroes in the game, now they want u to invest in their company because they need more money ? It seems they learned a lot from blizzard in the business perspective... And for execuse they are comparing the cost of developing an AAA game and this RTS that look like a mobile game... Seriously... Am i only one who think they are taking us for idiots?

I couldn’t agree more that audio is more important than graphics. SC:BW, WC2 and C&C:Tiberian titles all had amazing audio on both units attacks/voice lines and soundtrack all the while sharing a nice but limited isometric graphical presentation. A Zealot in SC:BW feels like it has weight when it attack with its psiblades, siege tanks feels like they pack a punch. C&C music is out of this world with how badass it is. I sadly feel like SC2 onwards units feel like they are firing bb guns that tickles rather than actual real life weaponry. This is why stormgate feels a bit bland and soulless despite having the fundamentals in terms of fluidity of gameplay and engine responsiveness.

After watching your video on Godsworn and Lowkos video on ZeroSpace I honestly doubt that they will have the success they imagine with the game. So far it's rather bland in comparison to other similar titles. :/

I want the RTS genre to get it's revival, but it should never be the customer's responsibility to make that financially viable. Frankly nothing about SG has impressed me yet, and now this is in fact doing the opposite.

If the game was actually fun to play, I would have considered investing... but it's not. It's boring, recycled bull crap.

Im guessing eithet options, or preferred shares/equity--if dividend is paid it goes to you before normal shares. But you don't get a vote in what the company does at shareholders meeting. Can be resold. Not sure what the SEC might say though. There are a lot of standards to delling equities and securities (any form of i.o.u whether it is ownership or not) as crypto market has found out.

It's not looking good chief

ill put money into this game only if it's not a micro-transaction hell sink. I don't want to be spending $10 per new mission or unit. i want to buy large chunks of content at once. you know like expansion packs.

Development just seems like it costs so much nowadays.

thanks for the in depth analysis sir.

I'd love to but the form required kinda has me stumped, I am not sure it is possible for me. If I do figure it out, I'll definitely invest. Sounds like easy money to me ^^

Why the need for milions on marketing? Many people interested in RTS know about this project... I have to say im disapointed after playing the demo...

I played stormgate beta. It looks like wc3 or sc2 without the backing of blizzard funding. I mean.. that's what it is isn't it?

Servers are expensive as fuck when you need a lot of them, for this reason, most big companies have strict running times and don't use them during the weekends if possible (testing environments etc). I doubt this amount of money will cover the server cost for long. One of the companies that I worked for invested that amount alone in 2 servers for AI 5-6y ago but a big part of the cost was GPUs (including 2x 8-9k$ GPUs).

Thanks for this Grubby, the FG/SG story is interesting. I didn't KS back it cause I was dubious. I want to see FG succeed. However, "Free-to-Play" games don't resonate with me. (Gen-Xr here!) Hype for SG is max for some, but I'm not sold. SG looks too derivative of Starcraft2 - jmo = its not innovative, inventive or fresh. I'm sure the gameplay is good on a technical level tho. I'm looking forward to Zerospace and other indie titles coming! Glad the RTS space is getting some attention in the end. (edit = had to specify Starcraft"2")

I love RTS games and I wish them the very best, but personally I am really not interested in Stormgate. Neither the look nor the universe motivate me to play the game and I fear that it is the same for many others. How should people be motivated to spend money on it then? I would rather pay once if I like the finished product and not be afraid of missing out on some content if I don't want to buy the cat in the bag now. It's all so unclear and there are other RTS in development that look way better. Good luck to Frost Giants though and to all being hyped for the game!

To "if the valuation changes" - the example is correct in the following sense: if one invests 1k at the valuation of 150M and then the valuation goes down to 15M, the estimated value of the investment goes from 1k to 100. And, because the investment is illiquid, there is no guarantee to get these 100, unless there is someone ready to buy that equity (or equity-like instrument) from you. With regards to the future revenues from investments - they come in two forms: dividends and increase in valuation. Companies have the incentive to pay dividends so that more investors would want to invest into their equity, so that they can grow the business. Also the equity holders have voting rights in the company's shareholder meetings, and may force the management to pay dividends.

Stormgate went from the hope of RTS to a shitshow really quick. Lost all interest in a few months

15:26 You misspelled 37M as 47M, right?

My impression is that it is okay so far. It doesn't blow my socks off. Not a fan of the graphics style, it reminds me of mobile games. They need a long EA, because I don't think it is close to the polish needed to be very successful.

I don't get why you're asking for the sucker punch why the promise of SG has always been to build a game with the community. I was in the SC2 alpha and I've been in the SG testing for a while, I can assure you SG has changed way more than SC2 and it keeps changing a lot. The devs are also way more receptive to feedback...I remember saying warpgates were problematic from the start...and they were for years...we're also going to get community made maps much faster in SG. Building a game with a community isn't compatible with what you're asking.

I will be honest: even with the pedigree this project has, I never expected sucess from it.