“Gate of Storms” multiplayer suddenly shut down—did the dorm’s group game just disappear?

It was all planned out for last night.

The four of us in the dorm had agreed to go back after class and play Stormgate all night. Then we refreshed the news and were instantly stunned: the game’s multiplayer mode is going to be temporarily shut down at the end of April, leaving only offline play. For someone like me, who uses “can we play together” as the number-one criterion, this is basically like getting a suspended sentence: you can still play, but it feels like half the game’s been cut out.

To be clear about what happened: it’s not that the devs suddenly gave up, it’s that their server partner Hathora ran into issues. Hathora got acquired by a company called Fireworks AI, which will mainly focus on AI inference compute from now on—basically saying goodbye to game server business. The result is that before the end of April, Hathora will gradually shut down services on the gaming side. Stormgate has to rush out a patch so people can at least play offline, while online modes are gone for now.

This feels exactly like when you borrow the router from the dorm next door to play games together, then they suddenly move out and take the internet cable with them. Your PC is still there, the game is still there, but everyone can only play against bots locally. The sense of loss is insane, especially considering Stormgate is made by the former StarCraft II team—we were really hoping it could become our new “dorm RTS for group bonding.”

What’s even more awkward is that whether online will come back later depends on whether they can find a new server partner. So at this point, all the dev team can do is salvage offline mode first, so players can at least still play. But if you want to queue ranked, theorycraft and trash-talk tactics with your buddies, or play those chaotic matches that feel like a dorm-room shouting match, that’s just not happening anytime soon. For someone like me, for whom “single-player = no soul,” this status is: the game isn’t dead, but the social part is.

And here’s the thing: games impacted by Hathora aren’t all suffering the same fate. Take Splitgate, for example. The studio 1047 Games directly said their backend already uses multiple providers, so Hathora’s changes barely affect the player experience. It’s like some dorms have only one key—once that roommate leaves, everyone’s locked out; other dorms give each person a key, so even if someone has a problem, everyone else can still get in. Stormgate this time basically tied its fate to a single company and is now being forced into a hard reset.

So here’s the question: is Stormgate worth getting into right now? If you’re like me and you buy games mainly to pull in a few classmates for premade squads, I’ll be very straightforward: hold off for now. In the short term, it’s offline only—you can practice your mechanics, study builds and strategies, but there’s no one to argue with, and you won’t get that fun dorm vibe of “why are you A-moving again without looking at the screen?” Unless you’re the type who really enjoys RTS single-player, loves grinding details against AI, then you can treat it as early practice.

The wildest part is that this whole thing reminds me yet again that for online games, “servers trump everything.” No matter how good the gameplay or how gorgeous the graphics are, if there’s a problem with the server partnership, it all turns into “theory on paper.” From now on, for any game that’s heavily focused on multiplayer—especially something I want to play long-term with classmates—I’m probably going to check first: does its backend rely on just one provider, or does it keep backups like Splitgate? Because whether a game can be fun together depends first on whether you can even get online together. If you can’t even get into the lobby, all the best jokes are just you talking to yourself.