Tim Morten is the CEO and Production Director of Frost Giant Studios. From his early days at Activision in 1994 to leading major teams at EA and Blizzard, Tim has seen it all. Now, he’s steering Frost Giant Studios as they launch their highly anticipated RTS game, Stormgate, which is now available for Early Access! 

Stormgate builds on the legacy of StarCraft 2 with a brand-new universe, crafted with Unreal Engine 5 and innovative tech. Recent playtests and demos suggest it’s shaping up to be a major hit.

In this episode, Tim reveals the behind-the-scenes challenges and strategies of developing Stormgate, the vital role of player feedback, and the complex world of venture capital and crowdfunding. Tune in to discover how Frost Giant Studios is setting new standards in the RTS genre.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• What inspired Tim to launch his own company
• Key takeaways from working on StarCraft 2 and the role of esports
• The highs and lows of moving from big publishers to a startup
• How developing in Early Access and leveraging community feedback shape the game
• The impact of community engagement on mental health and development
• Insights into securing venture capital and crowdfunding for game development

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Tim Morten on LinkedIn
• Frost Giant Studios, Inc.
• Stormgate

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep with creatives, founders, and executives about what has gone into their journey.

You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by Here is Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry that values quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. 

Today we have Tim Morten with us. Tim is the CEO and co-founder of Frost Giant Studios. He was previously the production director of StarCraft 2 and he's excited to now be working on a new real time strategy game that's coming out very soon called Stormgate. Tim started in the game industry in 1994 at Activision and subsequently helped lead development teams at EA and Blizzard.

Let's get started. Thanks so much for being here, Tim. 

Tim Morten: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. For anybody who is not super familiar, can you talk more about what you're allowed to talk about what you're doing at Frost Giant? 

Tim Morten: Absolutely. We're working on a new PC RTS. It's an independent studio, so we've really gotten to have complete agency over what we build. We're working in Unreal Engine 5, but we've built some of our own tech on top of that to facilitate building a real time strategy game. It's a brand new universe. It is going to be free to play and it launches July 30th for players who have purchased some content and then August 13th for anybody who wants to try it free to play.

Lizzie Mintus: Congratulations. This is getting real. What was the impetus to start your own company? It's a scary thing to do. 

Tim Morten: I had one past experience helming a startup and both paths have pros and cons like working at a big publisher versus being at a startup. But in this case, I was really committed to the idea of building a new RTS game and I wasn't going to be able to do that at.At Blizzard. I similarly had an experience working in RTS CDA and I knew that they weren't going to do a new one. So I felt like startup was just the best way to accomplish that. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you had the idea. You came up with the idea of something that you wanted to do, and then decided to start a company based on your idea.

Tim Morten: Yeah, pretty much that. I'd say, you know, the idea was just, I'd learned so much in terms of what resonated with players, taking Starcraft 2, sort of across the finish line with Legacy of the Void and then transitioning it into more of a live service model and taking it pre to play. And so there were these clear opportunities to build on those learnings. Yeah, that's what led to the idea.

Lizzie Mintus: That's your story. And then once you decided to start, tell me about recruiting people to work with you, like building your initial team. I know startups are interesting. There's struggles zero to one, one to five, five to 10. So can you talk about the early days and just getting everything sorted? 

Tim Morten: Totally. Yeah, I guess the first thing I would say is that Blizzard was an amazing place to work and in terms of the big companies that I've gotten to see from the inside. I felt like they felt the most like a dev studio at scale, as opposed to a sales and marketing organization at scale. Like most big publishers tend to be publishing driven, but Blizzard really felt development driven when I got there. So, you know, great experience. 

Certainly, there were cultural changes that have been covered in the press all over, but still, I think the core was just that it's a bunch of people who are very passionate about building great games. And so I had spoken to Blizzard leadership about this idea and to their credit, they were really supportive, but just the business circumstances at Blizzard were such that their focus needed to be on Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 that were in production right then. 

So because of that supportiveness, I was able to start Frostgine in a way where a group of people that had worked together at Blizzard We're able to come together at frost giant without there being any sense of tension. We really worked hard to facilitate those transitions with Blizzard in a way that didn't negatively impact anything that was in production at Blizzard and obviously have lots of friends there and think very highly of Blizzard as a company. 

But so that core group came over and since then, we've had an opportunity to diversify and bring people in from lots of different companies around the industry from like Riot and CD Projekt Red and EA and just all over the industry. So the character of the team certainly isn't just Blizzard, but that initial core founding group certainly came out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I was talking to Eugene Evans from Wizard and he was talking about his rule of five. Can't list him really off the top of my head, but it's like, you can have two out of five things. You can have a new team that hasn't worked together. You can have a new concept that you haven't done. You can have new tech and a few other things, but you can only pick two of those things. You can't have all of the new things. So it sounds like you have a genre you've done. You have a team that's already started to work together and knows each other. 

Tim Morten: Yeah, Eugene is awesome. He just visited probably a month ago. 

Lizzie Mintus: There you go. Everyone knows each other. 

Tim Morten: Yeah. Small industry. But there's a lot of merit to trying to keep the amount of variables bounded so that it's not just a completely uncontrolled risk. But the truth is every game got a lot of ‘new’ to it. And yeah, every game seems hard. 

Lizzie Mintus: Every game is a miracle. And every sequel is a miracle too. So it looks like you're developing really in the open. Can you talk to me a bit about what goes into developing an early access title and how that differs from maybe what you've done in the past?

Tim Morten: Yeah, it was cool to see the evolution, even from within some of the big publishing jobs that I've had around listening to the community. EA actually made a very conscious effort to bring the most passionate players together to get feedback on the command and conquer title that I had worked on there.

And that one unfortunately kind of fell victim to some of the structural changes that were going on at EA. So we didn't get to ship that. But not long after that, when I was at Blizzards, I made an effort to draw on that positive experience of having those player interactions when I got involved in Star Trek 2. 

And so we started holding community summits where we would, once a year, get players together, in person, to see a presentation from the dev team, play some things that we were working on that hadn't been released yet, and to just give us really frank feedback. And I think it was a win-win like I think the players who attended got a lot out of it, certainly the dev team got a lot out of it. But it's easy for dev teams to get in that kind of ivory tower mindset where they're just doing the thing that's in their head and they're not having that feedback loop with the community until late in the development cycle.

So I think those community summits were a beginning of the movement towards what we're doing now, which is full early access. And certainly like from the minute that Frost Giant started, we talked publicly about founding the company. And so even before we had any code written, people knew that we were setting out to build a new RTS. That's definitely the earliest that I've announced a product. It didn't have a name at that point, but that community feedback loop kind of already started there. And we were actively reaching out to prominent players in the community at that point. 

There is a tax to pay in terms of managing all of that feedback and also balancing it with your own sense of vision for what you want to do. Like, it's really important to be open to feedback, but it's also really important to have your own vision that you're driving towards. And so that's something that we've had to manage. And then as that feedback group expands and ultimately goes out to Reddit and YouTube and social channels where. A large number of people come in. There's a certain amount of inevitable critical feedback and that can have a tax, just on the mental health of the team. So that's a thing to manage as well. But in the end, I think we really do get a better game out of it. It's just a shift in mindset for us. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, what about for players? I know it's a big difference for them too. 

Tim Morten: I think most players seem to appreciate and engage with that kind of openness. There certainly are some players who I think prefer to wait for things to be fully cooked or maybe lean more towards being hypercritical until things are exactly what they want. But I want to believe that for the most part, players see a benefit out of this process as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: Do you think that there's any feedback that you've received so far that has really changed the direction of your game? 

Tim Morten: Tons. Early on, we were considering if we should just make it multiplayer only. And by multiplayer only, I mean, sort of team based multiplayer only. We also explored, should it be just a hero driven game? And I think in both cases, we got really clear feedback from the core player group that there are a lot of players who still value being able to play solo and that that's important to them. 

And we got very clear feedback from the one versus one competitive community that having heroes in that mode would be a turnoff for them and that it's fine to have heroes and other modes, but that there is a purity to one versus one competitive that would kind of be violated by making that change. So those are kind of early fundamental examples where we tested ideas, we got feedback, and it set a course for us that was different than when we went into those conversations. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's good to hear. And I'm sure the players that have given that feedback feel thrilled. 

Tim Morten: Hopefully. Yeah. We'll see. They may still find other things that they want us to improve, but, uh, but hopefully at least we got those things right.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, of course. And then how are you thinking about building community after your game launches or at least goes into early access? 

Tim Morten: Real time strategy is a little bit like fighting games, in that FGC, the fighting game community, is such a passionate and cohesive group that has stuck with that genre for so many years. I think strategy fans are very similar in that. So I say that because there's a certain amount of built in community to the genre and to specific games in the genre. 

But one of the leaders at Riot, when we were starting Frost Giant made this point about how every game has to find its community. So I think we're conscious that starting out that there's this existing community that is looking at our game and hopefully is excited about our game. But the exact player base that attaches to our game is just going to be specific to what we do, that like the design choices we've made, that like the lore that we create, that like the visual style, all of these things that cause people to attach to games.

And we've seen that play out through the social channels that we've got. I think over time we're seeing sort of more and more of a cohesive group that really is getting behind the game. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's exciting. It's amazing to have that before you even launch. 

I want to talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial beginnings because you touched on that. So, it looks like you worked at Activision and then you really quickly spun out. How did that occur? Can you give me the backstory there? 

Tim Morten: Yeah, no worries. I did about five years at the beginning of my career at Activision when it was a much smaller company and there were very few people at the company at that point in time who had actually released games. So we were all kind of learning together and learning from those few that did have that experience.

And at a certain point, I had worked on a few games there at Activision at that point. There was a desire, I think, on the management side of Activision to work with more external developers. We were seeing companies like Id Software or back then Nihilistic Games do deals externally with Activision. And as internal teams were like, well, that, that seems pretty cool to have more agency over what we're making to be our own company. Let's see if management would be willing to give that a try with us. And so we approached leadership and had a chance to kind of spin off as a team back in 98, coming off of Mechwarrior 2 and Heavy Gears or these giant robot games. 

Ironically, there was another team that was going through this exact same thought process at the exact same time called pandemic studios. So they had worked on some different games like Battlezone and Darkrain. And so Pandemic and then the company that I founded with some other partners back then called Savage, both started at roughly the same time. And both companies got our first deals from Activision. It was actually pretty cool. I know Activision leadership took a lot of criticism, but that was a moment where Activision was really being supportive of startups and being supportive of these employees who wanted to embark on that journey. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you've pretty much written the playbook on how to get a large company to let you spin out because you've done it twice.

If there's any listeners that are at a big company and have a team and want to leave on a good note, which it seems like you've really done, how would they go about approaching this? You obviously have a method. 

Tim Morten: You make me sound smarter than I feel because in both cases, it was kind of unique circumstances. I think if there's 1 piece of commonality, it's having a good relationship with the leadership of the company and their open mindedness and being willing to entertain this. And to be clear in the Blizzard circumstance, though, it was a friendly departure. Blizzard didn't invest in us or back us as Frost Giant. I would have loved it if they did, but they were incredibly gracious and supportive about it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, probably had some other things going on that they need to deal with, perhaps. 

Okay, and then, tell me more. So you spun out of Activision, and then you started doing deals with them externally, but you did other deals with Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers. How did you get all these other deals?

Tim Morten: Yeah, we got to work on a bunch of different licenses back then and it really was more a means to keep revenue flowing for that company. So back then because publishers controlled the one channel to get games into consumer hands, which was retail. Steam didn't exist. You know, the Apple app store, none of these existed. So it was all about retail. You had to work with a publisher. 

So it was these advances against royalty deals, which still exist today, but obviously distribution is so much more diverse. There are a lot of other ways to fund games today. But back then you had to have a publisher. So that was a learning experience. Like as a dev team who had worked on some games together, we just wanted to make more cool games. None of us were mBAs. None of us were setting out really to make a business out of it. And so we got thrust into this situation where we had to learn how to make the business work. 

And it was a great education, but I think some of my takeaways from that were that it is important to have a business person. And though we learned it. We certainly didn't start with that knowledge. And by contrast, I think pandemic did have a business person and did a much better job of navigating the business side. 

I think we learned that being a service business is tough. Ultimately, they're hiring us to build a game out of these licenses. So we don't have a lot of agency. And that business model is tough. I have so much respect for companies that do developer publisher deals that are milestone based and manage to thrive because ultimately every milestone is necessary to pass certification from the publisher in order to get paid. And that means that you are constantly racing to get the next paycheck. And realistically, you're constantly incentivized to make whatever compromises are necessary to hit those milestones. So you never really have security in that business model, and it's very difficult to produce quality products when you're every four weeks, every six weeks being incentivized to make compromises in order to get paid.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. And you've taken a very different, unique approach to funding your company. So can you talk about, first you have VC funding, right? 

Tim Morten: Yeah, Frost Giant was fortunate in its timing, basically. And I wish I could take credit for this, but really, unbeknownst to me, while I was busy working on StarCraft 2 at Blizzard, this ecosystem of venture funds that were interested in backing game studios came into existence. And certainly, there were individual VCs, guys like Mitch Lasky at Benchmark or Ben Gordon at Kleiner Perkins, who were doing game deals here and there, but there wasn't really an ecosystem around it. And so that ecosystem started to come into existence, I would say around 2018. And so when I left Blizzard late in 2019, I was entering into a place in time where there was an ecosystem of VCs to pitch to. 

Lizzie Mintus: A frothy ecosystem of VCs to pitch to . 

Tim Morten: Yeah, completely fair. The timing was good. And it was our mutual friend Dean Takahashi at GamesBeat who suggested some of the funds that I should talk to because I didn't know who was funding games at that point. And frankly, I was a little skeptical having failed to get a new RTS screen lit at EA and failed to get a new RTS screen lit at Blizzard that going out to VCs was going to meet with a positive response. But obviously it turns out, it did so, yay. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yay, indeed. And were you the one pitching? 

Tim Morten: It was me, and I was very fortunate to have a co-founder in Tim Campbell who I had come into contact with some years earlier. And at that point in time, Tim was finishing up Wasteland 3 at InXile. But he was open to this idea and enthusiastic about building a new RTS. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and so many people, maybe bamboozled is the right word, are bamboozled by VC or don't really know where to start and feel disappointed by rejection, which is obviously generally inevitable.

Can you talk a little bit about some learnings that you learned from pitching successfully?

Tim Morten: I definitely didn't know what I was doing going into building the deck, but I did have this core thesis of being in a space that was largely abandoned by the big publishers. Microsoft is still obviously doing Age of Empires, SEGA's got some RTS games that they're still producing, but largely, I think the audience was abandoned.

So it felt like a Blue Ocean opportunity, some very clear learnings coming out of StarCraft and bringing StarCraft 3 to play at Blizzard, you know, group of people who knew how to build this kind of game, so it felt like there were some good core ingredients in there. I think some of the staples of a pitch deck for VCs like total addressable market weren't things that I had to encounter inside a big publisher.

So those slides were completely absent from my pitch, but I guess between doing this at a time that was frothy to your point and having some core ingredients that. Resonating with VCs was kind of key to Frost Giant's success. I've definitely learned a lot more as I've had an opportunity to work with these funds and see other developers pitches and get a sense.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Tam, it's something you don't know until you begin, for sure. And then Kickstarter. And you have your start engine campaign. I would love for you to go into detail about both and how you decided on these. 

Tim Morten: Yeah. And I guess to connect those dots, having started with VC, and then done an A round with a strategy, which was Kakao games in Korea, which we were again, super fortunate on timing, that was sort of late 2021. We were talking to them in early 22, that run closed. We basically had enough capital to get to the finish line. And there were some opportunistic things that we would like to do that drove the quest for additional capital through Kickstarter, Indiegogo and currently on, on Start Engine.

And the first of those things was doing a physical product. So physical collector's edition, which is, I guess sort of a Blizzard thing, but also a nostalgia game. We just loved the idea of having a physical box with some cool things in it. And in our case, we're doing a statue and some other cool physical goods that players could get.

And then we were just getting tons of requests about how to get into the beta. And so the server cost associated with having high player counts is something we would need to offset to accommodate that. And so, again, crowdfunding was a mechanism by which to do that. Kickstarter, I hadn't even realized how much it had fallen out of favor with video games. Like, there were previously some pretty big game projects on Kickstarter, obviously- Star Citizen, famous for raising tons of money on Kickstarter. But the year that we did it last year going into this year, there wasn't that much activity. And so it turned out that people were kind of down on the potential, but we wound up doing close to two and a half.

It was like 2.4 on.Kickstarter and took late pledges through Indiegogo that took it over 2.5. And so that was more than enough to do what we wanted to do with collector's edition, facilitate, even doing a week of open beta for Steam Nest Fest. And then now we've got a crowd equity round that we're doing with Start engine. And unlike the Kickstarter where players get access to the game and physical goods in the form of the collector's edition, the start engine campaign is really about giving us the capital to market the game ourselves in the West. And that was something that was important to us to stay independent. Going back to those developer publisher deals, like a lot of the compromise inequality that I saw doing those deals made me want to stay independent from the publishing storm. 

Lizzie Mintus: And was there a playbook that you played by, or did you kind of invent your own playbook for doing this? Was there a company that you're like, Hey, this company did this really well, or it's just new?

Tim Morten: Definitely looked at other video game Kickstarter campaigns to try to model our campaign on successful, even some non video game campaigns for both the Kickstarter and the start engine. But yeah, in terms of drawing on those specific capital sources, I think it's just looking at the options that are out there and trying to pick the ones that fit what you're trying to do.

And in the case of Kickstarter, it felt like because we were trying to deliver something to players that engaging directly with players made sense. In the case of StartEngine, I think it was just a recognition that we think players agree with us, that publishing the game independently is the best way to go. And we felt like they would support us and they have, so it's been great. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Kind of a cool way for them to get involved too. And I mean, in everything that you're doing, I feel like it's very player centric, right? You can own this, you can have input working with people, which people enjoy. 

Tim Morten: Yeah, hopefully. And again, one of the wonderful things about RTS is just the passion of that community. So hopefully, they feel like they're getting something that brings them joy as much as they're helping support us. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Win win. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about Starcraft 2. So you were the production director and I think people always tell you about the end product and how it was so great but there's so many ups and downs and compromises and deadlines and crazy things on the way.

Can you talk about some of the ups and downs that went into creating it? 

Tim Morten: For sure. The first thing I'll say is Starcraft 2 was already an amazing and successful game before I ever got there. And so it was a really cool experience to have an opportunity to come into a leadership position on a product that was already launched and that I was already an avid fan of as a player. Like that never happens over the course of my career. So that was amazing. 

I think coming into a leadership position on a high functioning team like that can be intimidating because they know the product and know the vision better than you do when you start out. And so you've got to just absorb that and get to the point that you can help steer that vision in a way that adds value and doesn't interfere with all of that before your arrival. 

In my case, the team was bifurcating at that point in time because part of the team was going off to work on heroes of the storm. And so there was this organizational challenge of just figuring out how to have two products that were needing to operate independently, but we're sharing resources, structure in a way that could function successfully. And I was lucky to have good leadership above me and a good group that was working with me that could navigate those and set both projects up for success. But definitely part of that roller coaster was coming into a situation where there were challenges like that to solve before both products could really be set up for success.

Lizzie Mintus: Then you converted Starcraft 2 to a live service and then free to play. What went into that? 

Tim Morten: Part of the impetus for that was that there was a lot of confusion over how much it cost to play StarCraft. I think everybody thought you'd have to buy three expansions for potentially more than a hundred dollars to be able to play StarCraft, and that wasn't actually true. But it was also the case that we wanted to embrace the idea of continuing to support the game post launch with more than just patches. We wanted to have a plan that was going to provide meaningful content for years to come. Because really, Blizzard tries to continue to invest in games after they launch anyway. So building a plan around it that was conscious and explicit instead of just organic, I guess, is part of what the motivation was.

And it was challenging to take a dev team who had two years between releases and pivot into a mode where we're releasing new content every month. That was a big mind shift for that team. I think another challenge that we faced was that a certain amount of the team had been working on Starcraft or even RTS as a genre for so long that they were eager to go off and try some other things within the company, but not on the team. And so having a certain amount of team transition and then a huge amount of process transition at the same time was a little disruptive, but ultimately we solved those. 

Lizzie Mintus: You solve them by? 

Tim Morten: In terms of the team transition solved them by finding the people who were passionate about continuing. And in some cases, people who came from the community and other cases, people who came from other parts of the company, some interns who had come in who were like super fans and rebuilding the team such that the composition was again about passion. 

In terms of the process stuff, that took some experimentation like leapfrog development where multiple sub teams work on different pieces of content so that you can pipeline the delivery to have content that lands every month, getting more efficient about how we produce things, just a lot of kind of operational and tactical stuff that we did. 

Lizzie Mintus: Makes sense. Yeah. That's a hard one, but it sounds like it set you up for where you are today. Any other big unexpected takeaways from your StarCraft time or anything you learned that you really wanted to bring into your company today?

Tim Morten: Maybe one other thing worth mentioning is just the value of esports. I think many companies have struggled to figure out the right way to approach eSports. It's easy to spend large sums of money and not necessarily see a direct return. At the same time, there is clear value and there is a definite audience around eSports. And so how do you thread that needle to invest appropriately to get all of the great things about eSports? It was fascinating to see the Starcraft approach, the Overwatch approach, looking outward at Dota 2, League of Legends, CSGO. 

We are very much still passionate about esports at Frost Giant, but trying to, again, take some of those learnings and approach esports in a way that's responsible and still hopefully effective.

Lizzie Mintus: Responsible. I like that word. It's a good word for 2024. We are being responsible. 

Tim Morten: There it is. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: I have one last question. And before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, frostgiant.com. 

The last question is, what advice would you give somebody who wants to start a game studio in the responsible year of 2024?

Tim Morten: I would say, it's all about coming up with something that players will genuinely be excited about and embrace. And those ideas seem to come from all corners. It's certainly not just about ex Blizzard or ex Riot teams. I think we've seen a lot of new teams emerge into the forefront. I think that is really empowering because those barriers of having worked someplace big don't really exist, but it is all about just having that great idea.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And a great team it sounds like. The people that you've worked with and can work with again, you already have a leg up. You already know how to work with each other. 

Tim Morten: Yeah, I feel very lucky there, but of course, this year there are so many great game makers out there in the job market. I think the opportunity to build great teams is all over right now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And even get people that have all worked together in the past to join your team. It's a great opportunity, a great hiring opportunity. And it helps the company be responsible with their hiring practices, or I guess respectful with their hiring practices.

For me, it's always so interesting when things are good in a candidate market and candidates start asking for all this stuff and sending demand letters. And then when things are better for employers, then things get looser, perks drop, and maybe people don't get responded to. 

So I think it's really important to be good to other people, no matter what, because like we've seen, sometimes things are really good. Sometimes things are really great for one side, but it'll always flip. 

Tim Morten: Yeah, the culture piece is definitely important. And yeah, I've seen, that it kind of doesn't matter big company or small company. I've seen good cultures at both. I've seen bad cultures at both. But yeah, for people who are in the market to figure out where to go next, that's definitely an important criteria. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And I also think about where you really want to be. I mean, depending on the circumstances, sometimes you just need a job, but if you have the luxury to really be thoughtful about it.

Tim Morten: Yeah, I think most people in games are in games because they're passionate about it. So I've been lucky to work with teams that were really particularly passionate about the projects that they're working on, but hopefully those opportunities increase for everybody. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, things can't be bad forever. I like what you said, too. You said when you were working on StarCraft, you wanted to make sure everyone on your team was really passionate about what it is that they were doing. Sounds like indirectly, if they weren't, there were other homes. You also said that about starting your company.

Tim Morten: Yeah, it feels very mission driven which I think gives everybody this intrinsic sense of motivation that I hope leads to better outcomes. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's science. We've been talking to Tim Morten, who is the production director and CEO of Frost Giant Studios. Tim, where can people go to contact you, play your game, get involved in the community, etc.?

Tim Morten: For the game, Steam is the current home of Stormgate. There's also a playstormgate.com site you could go to. And for myself, LinkedIn is the primary social channel for me.

Lizzie Mintus: Put a very specific note too. If you connect with people, that's a good role of LinkedIn coming from a recruiter.

I heard you want X. I want to connect about X. Yeah. Thank you so much. 

Tim Morten: Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.