Splitgate to remain in open beta indefinitely after 10m downloads in under 30 days
"This has been the most surreal time of my life…"
Hit free-to-play first-person shooter Splitgate is to remain in open beta for the foreseeable future.
Developer 1047 Games extended the game's open beta as it works to increase server capacity.
Splitgate, a sci-fi competitive first-person shooter that's like a cross between Halo and Portal, was set to launch proper in July on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
But 1047 Games delayed Splitgate's launch to August because the open beta was so popular.
2 million people downloaded Splitgate's crossplay open beta in just two weeks, which caused server issues.
1047's four engineers - out of a total team of 30 - took the game from 400 concurrent players to more than 75,000 in a matter of days.
Overnight, 1047 said Splitgate has seen more than 10m downloads in under 30 days. The game shot up to more than 175,000 in just a few weeks.
Player queue times are now usually less than 10 minutes. Ranked Duos mode just went live. A "significant" announcement is planned for gamescom next week.
"This has been the most surreal time of my life," said Ian Proulx, CEO and co-founder of 1047 Games.
"The fan support has been incredible as we work to improve the player experience. We never dreamed of having to scale this big this quickly, and as a result we have had to overcome challenges to keep up with player demand.
"We met several major milestones in a short time, creating a stable platform where fans can expect to find a server to play on relatively quickly, and I'm proud of what our team has accomplished - but there's a lot more to come!"
Explaining the decision to extend the open beta period, Proulx said: "In looking at the issues facing the scalability of the game's backend, the process includes far more than simply dealing with server capacity.
"We are focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game's concurrent capacity in order to minimize player wait times. We want to do this the right way, and we want to be prepared for massive scale when we officially launch, all the while continuing to improve the beta with frequent updates, additional features, and improvements to server capacity."