Sometimes, too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. For competitive multiplayer arena shooter Splitgate, that thing is sudden viral popularity. For any small project, becoming an overnight success is a dream. In Splitgate's case, however, that success was too much, too quickly, and has led to an emergency of sorts at developer 1047 Games. Not only did Splitgate's open beta have to be shut down this past week, but 1047 has now decided to delay the game's July 27 launch.
In a livestream recorded Monday morning, 1047 made several interesting announcements regarding the future of Splitgate. The first big announcement was that Splitgate's July 27 launch is going to have to be delayed due to ongoing issues with its servers. As those following Splitgate since its open beta started two weeks ago already know, 1047 had to put things on pause because its servers could only handle up to around 65,000 players concurrently. It's still actively working on that issue.
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For now, the new release window for Splitgate's full launch is in August. Obviously, that's somewhat ambiguous, but 1047 is going through a lot right now despite only having an engineering team of four. 1047 previously said it was working on a queuing system so that Splitgate would be playable while it worked on expanding its servers. To sate some worries, 1047 plans to restart Splitgate's beta servers tomorrow, July 27, while it works on long-term solutions going into August.
As for the other big news that 1047 had to share, it's recently received a significant investment to help build out its engineering team from an investment group. And by recent, that means 1047 received $10 million over the weekend as its small indie team struggled to get Splitgate up and running again. Needless to say, the small team at 1047 will be rapidly growing in the coming weeks and months and could very well become a big team.
To add some perspective to the challenges 1047 is trying to overcome, Splitgate was apparently downloaded over 2 million times in the short span after it launched its open beta. It's easy to see then how Splitgate not only surpassed the game's cap of around 65,000 players but why 1047 had every reason to believe it would continue to struggle under high numbers of players. The audience for this exciting competitive arena shooter with portals is vast.
It's just a matter of time before 1047 is able to expand its server cap that will allow more than 65,000 concurrent players back into Splitgate. It may take longer than previously expected, but in the meantime, the returning open beta will hopefully allow plenty to experience the game. Expect to hear further updates from 1047 in the weeks ahead.
Splitgate is expected to launch in August on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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