Splitgate is a game with a lot of dreams. Made by the four-person indie studio 1047 Games, Splitgate arrived on Steam back in 2019 with an interesting mix of Portal and Halo-style arena multiplayer gameplay. The game has lasers, get packs, machine guns, and most importantly, the ability to create, move, and shoot through portals.
It's a novel concept and one that immediately came with massive esports aspirations with a Silver.tv partnership. Those aspirations are still there, but the buy-in from players wasn't. Steamcharts reports player counts were in the mere hundreds for the two years since then as 1047 continued development.
That all changed earlier this week. While there are plenty of PC players out there, most games don't hit the big time until they get a console release, which is exactly what Splitgate plans to do on July 27.
Before that, 1047 is hosting an open beta on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, with full crossplay between the three of them. This has not only brought in thousands of new PlayStation and Xbox players but it's also brought back thousands of PC players too.
The beta got started on July 13, and although it took a week to really get going, Splitgate has been breaking concurrent player records for the past three days. First, they had 1,000 players, then 4,000 concurrent players, and then 50,000 players. They topped out at 65,000 players last night, and that was only because they hit the physical limit of how many connections their servers could handle at once.
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With a hard cap causing all kinds of issues, such as disconnects and long login queues, 1047 decided to take the servers offline while they made back-end changes to increase server capacity.
"We have decided to take the beta offline for tonight. It’s been a rough day trying to handle this scale and it’s not fair to you,” 1047 wrote last night. “Everyone who played the beta so far will get 5 drops as a token of our appreciation. Stay tuned for more updates and optimizations in the morning.”
Complicating matters was yesterday’s internet outage that took down both the Steam and PlayStation storefronts. But then, that might have been a blessing for Splitgate as it buckled under player counts it had never seen.
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