Free-to-play FPS Splitgate was planning to move from beta to full launch tomorrow but there’s been a bit of a snag. It turns out that “Halo plus portals” was too popular a concept, raking in 2 million downloads during its open beta. So many people jumped in to take a turn with cross-platform team portal shooting that 1047 Games say they’re delaying full launch of the game until next month while they work to scale up their available servers for all those players.
Splitgate looks to be pretty much exactly what you’d imagine of a portal-shooting FPS. Players can shoot portals and bullets both, competing on teams in 15 different game types across 20 maps. You can spot all the action down here in its announcement trailer from June.
If that sounds like a good time, especially being free-to-play, yeah you aren’t the only one who thought so. Splitgate kicked off its cross-platform open beta on July 13th and has had quite an explosion of concurrent players since.
1047 Games communicated server instability due to overwhelming player numbers several times over the last two weeks. According to Steam.db, Splitgate was pulling in about 1,400 concurrent Steam players on July 13th. It hit over 15,000 this Sunday after a steady upward trend over the last two weeks. That’s just on Steam, mind. As of July 20th, 1047 Games reported breaking 50,000 concurrent players across all platforms.
1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx explains that the sudden popularity means some extra work before a proper launch.
“Our team has been blown away by the incredible reception the Splitgate community has shown us. With the steep and sudden increase in players trying to access servers, we’re having to sort out a myriad of technical issues that come with this level of insane growth. We’ve worked hard to provide a high-quality game and experience, and our biggest challenge is simply to have enough capacity to serve the entire community.”
1047 Games will be releasing some of what they’d planned for launch day tomororw, they say, but leaving the game technically in its open beta state. “Tuesday’s pre-release beta version will feature the three new maps, and all-new customization options,” they say. “It will also include many frequently requested features from its open beta, including mouse and keyboard support and an FOV slider on console, and customizable controller layouts.”
1047 have delayed the official launch into August. They’ve also announced an additional $10 million (about £7,236,00) in funding from Human Capital which will help expand 1047’s engineering team and expand server capacity for launch.
You can find Splitgate free-to-play over on Steam. It’s also available on PS4, PS5, and the Xbox boxes.