It’s back, but it’s still struggling to keep pace with all the other players.
Splitgate, a free-to-play FPS Splitgate that combines Halo and Portal, has been available on PC for several years. However, it’s struggled with maintaining a player base. Steam Charts shows that a strong launch in May 2019 saw a decrease to just over 100 concurrent players per month. The player count started to increase in late 2020. However, it has become very difficult to matchmake into games.
This is due to the July 27 launch of the console, and the open beta currently underway. Beta launched July 13th with crossplay between PC, Xbox and PlayStation. It was a huge success. Developer 1047 Games extended the beta and then took it off-line yesterday because of high demand.
Unfortunately, the beta test is still in progress. “We spent all night optimizing, but after talking with AWS [Amazon Web Services], our database (redis can only handle 65.536 concurrent users (what we hit last evening),” 1047 tweeted. “So, no optimizations are necessary yet. We are currently working on a queue system that will allow 65k people in, until we eliminate this limitation.
While console gamers account for a large portion of the sudden increase in demand, Steam is also seeing significant spikes in activity: Steam Charts reports that more than 8,400 people are currently playing the game at the moment. This is a massive jump in demand. Unfortunately, the server problems are also affecting PC gamers. Morgan and I tried to log in this afternoon, approximately 30 minutes apart. We got this:
1047 stated that it would like to see a queue system in place “shortly” to better manage traffic. However, it also has a pin tweet clearly designed to manage expectations.
Long-term, the question is how Splitgate will maintain these numbers following its full console launch on July 27, 2012. It will happen with luck, or at the very least, something close. The more long-term question is whether Splitgate can maintain these numbers after July 27’s full console launch. Morgan noted that it is an “underrated arena FPS” that could be compared to Halo if everyone had a portal gun. This is certainly not the worst idea I’ve ever seen for a videogame.
