Splitgate dev "blown away" as "Halo meets Portal" FPS explodes in popularity

The developer of Splitgate never expected its open crossplay beta to be so popular.

The free-to-play sci-fi competitive multiplayer shooter, which has been described as "Halo meets Portal", launched an open crossplay beta on 13th July. This let PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One players all play with and against each other for the first time.

Splitgate has been knocking around on PC since May 2019 with a relatively small player base, but the crossplay beta sparked an explosion of popularity (to the tune of half a million downloads) that caused severe server problems. So severe, in fact, that developer 1047 Games was forced to take the beta offline.

According to a tweet, 1047 Games eventually discovered its database can only handle 65,536 concurrent players, which Splitgate hit two nights ago. 1047 Games then set to work on a queue system to cope with the sheer volume of players, with a long-term solution in the works.

We don't want to over-promise anything but want to be as transparent as possible because we are learning a lot! We should have a queue system implemented shortly so 65k players can play, and we will work on changing our database implementation over the next 24 hours.

In another tweet, 1047 Games described itself as "a small dev team with a total of four engineers". And in a message to players published last night, 1047 Games said it had hired an additional back-end engineer to help - and committed to launch proper on 27th July.

"We are truly blown away," 1047 Games said.

According to Steam Charts, Splitgate's last 24-hours concurrent peak on Valve's platform was 11,601, which suggests the bulk of the players are on console. Still, it's a massive uptick on PC, where peak concurrents could only manage triple digits each month since July 2019.

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