Splitgate

» see splitgate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

splitgate landed in the arena-shooter window that i had aged out of by the time it arrived. by 2019 i was in my mid-thirties on edge-ai work in ankara. arena shooters with portal physics on a console controller were not the genre my evenings could absorb anymore. but the july 2021 surge was loud enough that it crossed into general tech press, and the name registered.

the project came out of stanford. ian proulx and nicholas bagamian, two computer science students, started 1047 games to build a shooter that took the halo combat feel and grafted portal's wormhole mechanic on top. early access shipped on steam on 24 may 2019. for the first two years it sat at a modest concurrent count, like most early-access shooters with a small dev team.

the july 2021 console beta was the inflection. the title went from a few thousand concurrents to over a hundred thousand inside a week. six hundred thousand downloads in the first beta week, every shooter outlet covering it as the surprise hit of the summer. 1047 games raised a hundred-million-dollar series b on the back of the surge.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the 1.0 launch landed on 15 september 2022 across pc and console, free to play, with cross-platform play and a season-pass monetization layer. by then the surge had already cooled. the live-service shooter market was crowded with fortnite and apex legends pulling the casual audience while call of duty pulled the competitive crowd. splitgate's distinctive portal mechanic gave it identity but the audience that turned up in 2021 had largely moved on.

1047 announced in 2023 that the team was shifting focus to a sequel, splitgate 2. the original game went into maintenance mode through 2024 with no major content updates. the player count drifted down to a few hundred concurrents on steam by early 2025.

~ what got buried with it ~

splitgate 2 launched on 6 june 2025. on 29 august 2025 the original splitgate servers shut down. the studio framed it as a focus decision rather than a kill, the sequel was supposed to inherit the audience and the matchmaking infrastructure. the original servers went off without ceremony.

splitgate is the case study for a particular kind of game death. the product had a surge moment that the studio scaled team and ambitions around. when the surge did not sustain, the studio rebooted the brand to try the same trick a second time. the sequel is still online as of mid-2026. the question of whether the audience returns for the second pass is not yet answered. the original six-year run ended cleanly enough that there is nothing to play of it anymore.

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