Tales of developers gaining success beyond their wildest dreams with their new title are generally few and far between, but 1047 Games is currently in this great position. Their upcoming free-to-play portal shooter Splitgate has just been in open beta, but it was so popular that the servers reached maximum capacity and the developer was forced to take the beta offline while they try to procure more server capacity for the game’s official launch.
The Splitgate beta was downloaded and played by 600,000 unique players across its six day period. Due to its popularity, the beta was initially extended so more players could try it out. The problem was the small team at developer 1047 Games has just four engineers and they struggled to cope with the demands of this many players. The main issue is the game’s database is set to a maximum of 65,536 concurrent players (for the non-programmers amongst you, that’s the number of values represented by 16 binary digits), and the game hit that limit yesterday.
Until the dev team can remove this limitation, they’ve taken the beta offline and are trying to create a queue system for when the game goes live. Those who have managed to play the beta so far will get five drops as “a token of appreciation”. 1047 Games co-founder Nicholas Bagamian said:
So far our community has been gracious and understanding of our downtime as we work to release various bottlenecks that have occurred as more people jump in to play. We are a small, growing team and are working around the clock to make sure that our transition to launch is as smooth as possible so that as many people who want to play can jump in without issues.
Splitgate will release fully on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on July 27 and will allow crossplay with players on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. At launch the game will have three new arenas, a Showdown game mode, skins, and loadouts amongst the new content players won’t have seen in the beta. The team is hoping to have removed the database limitations by the time the game launches. Despite these issues, 1047 Games other co-founder Ian Proulx expressed his gratitude for the game’s reception:
I want to sincerely thank every single player who has taken a chance on our game. From its small beginnings as a student project when we were in college to today, where we’re on the verge of launching across two generations of consoles, this is a dream come true for me and the result of incredibly hard work by everyone at our studio. I especially want to thank our loyal PC players who have stuck with us since our game first rolled out on Steam. We cannot wait to continue to iterate on Splitgate and grow the game alongside our growing fans.
