Splitgate is a free-to-play arena shooter with portals … and it’s been surprisingly popular with over 10 million downloads.
Taken from Engadget … Splitgate, a frenetic free-to-play arena shooter with portals, has become a word of mouth hit with 10 million downloads in under 30 days. Developer 1047 Games has announced that the game will remain in open beta indefinitely as it works on managing the sudden influx of players. As a result, Splitgate is no longer slated to fully launch this month. Instead, 1047 will continue to roll out updates and fixes to the game complete with new content and improvements to the backend that can facilitate the uptick in players. Queue times are now less than 10 minutes and a new Ranked Duos mode recently went live.
Splitgate injected the tired arena shooter with a much needed blast of vitality by adding portals to the mix. Players can cast these wormholes around the map and even shoot opponents through them. It helps that it’s free-to-play, contains a variety of guns and plenty of game modes (like Team deathmatch, Team Shotty Snipers and Team SWAT).
While the game has been in early access since 2019, it exploded in popularity in the wake of its open beta launch in early July, which brought with it cross-play with Xbox and PlayStation consoles. According to 1047, the shooter went from an initial 4,000 concurrent players to more than 175,000 in a few weeks. Naturally, the massive increase caused backend issues. Splitgate was taken offline twice in recent weeks as the small 1047 team worked on server optimizations.
Source: Engadget