Splitgate Shuts Down Servers Ahead of Official Release on Tuesday
While the feedback and popularity have been astounding for Splitgate’s console beta, it has not been without its fair share of issues. The “Halo meets Portal” style FPS game has seen an incredible surge of popularity since the beta came out a couple of weeks ago – I have not seen anything like it. Splitgate is so popular that 1047 Games has been forced to shut down their servers until the official release of the game tomorrow.
Originally released in 2019 on PC, Splitgate maintained low levels of popularity with just over 1000 concurrent players. Their team was approximately 25 people in total, including only four engineers. This was fine for a game of that size, but there is no way that 1047 Games could have foreseen their sudden uptick in popularity. Since the release of Splitgate’s beta on console, the game has become the number one free game on Xbox, as well as the number one trending game on Playstation and Steam. With more than 700,000 new downloads, Splitgate seems poised to compete with the likes of Warzone, Apex Legends, and Fortnite.
There is just one problem: their servers. With so many new players, 1047 Games has been struggling to keep up with demand. It was revealed that Splitgates servers could handle a maximum of 65,536 players at a time, a number they hit multiple times during the beta. The results were error messages when trying to log in, a visual glitch that would reset your account to level one, and a ton of matchmaking bugs that made it hard for new players to participate. Anybody who has tried to log in within the past couple of days knows what I am referencing. It was frustrating.
All of that said, I am cutting 1047 Games a TON of slack here. They had to know that there would be a surge in downloads and players when they released Splitgate on console (otherwise there would be no point in doing it), but who would have expected this? If you told the developers a month ago that they would get 700,000 downloads over the course of two weeks, they likely would have laughed in your face. On top of the influx of players, a team of four engineers is not suited to make fast changes with numbers like this. It has been a slow process, but the team has clearly been working around the clock to put their servers back together. They have been transparent and I truly believe that they really want to create a great experience for us.
Honestly, they probably made the best decision possible when they decided to take servers offline for the second time ahead of the game’s full release. I am no tech expert, but I can imagine that trying to enhance servers while 65,000 people are trying to get on said servers is a difficult task. And games usually have some downtime between the beta trials and the actual release anyway, right? The whole point of a beta is to iron out bugs ahead of the full launch. Instead of frustrating new and returning players with rampant server issues, it may have been best to just shut it down for a day or two.
Here is the good news: The majority of players are being pretty gracious about the situation. It seems that most people understand that this was a small studio that could not have predicted the massive increase in volume in such a short period of time. Simply put, Splitgate found lightning in a bottle with a perfect storm of circumstances. With players getting bored of playing the same game for so long (Fortnite and Apex) and Activision’s issues regarding legal troubles and hackers, Splitgate is the perfect escape for a lot of gamers. Personally, I think I will be playing Splitgate almost exclusively until the release of Battlefield 2042. Tune in the Vendetta Sports Media Twitch account to see Jackson Law and I tear it up on Splitgate (when the servers are back up, that is).
More to come.
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