The past few days have granted fans with plenty of news about the first-person portal shooter Splitgate, with several future developments to look forward to. Xbox recently added a Splitgate bundle for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers containing exclusive character and weapon skins, and a community poll created by developer 1047 Games has hinted that the game might get ranked modes further down the line. However, it also seems that 1047 has decided to focus their efforts on improving Splitgate for the time being and have decided to further push back a potential release date.
This decision comes on the heels of Splitgate's surprise popularity, which caused its concurrent player count on Steam to rise from around 5,000 players to nearly 175,000 players within weeks. At one point 1047 took Splitgate servers down to establish a better queue system for the game, which originally was only meant to handle 65,000 concurrent players at a maximum. Since then, the game has hit the incredible milestone of 10 million downloads across its various platforms, and 1047 now wants to hone in on server stability and capacity.
Though the original launch date for version 1.0 of Splitgate was set for July 27, this was pushed back to sometime in August shortly after the game's huge player surge. Now, 1047 has decided to indefinitely delay Splitgate's full launch and keep it in an open beta period in order to look at issues dealing with the "scalability of the game's backend." 1047 CEO Ian Proulx further clarifies that the development team is "focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game's current capacity in order to minimize player wait times."
Proulx also mentions that along with addressing the game's scalability issues, 1047 wants to continue to add "frequent updates" and "additional features" to the beta. The studio does have plans to add next-gen upgrades for Splitgate on PS5/Xbox Series X, though the planned implementation of these is also likely to be pushed further into the future now that there is no full release for the game in sight. Fans hoping for the game to make it to mobile platforms or Nintendo Switch will also just have to be patient and see where things stand at the end of 2021.
For now, 1047 has managed to make a dent in queue times for eager players. Times are usually 10 minutes or under depending on traffic and the server status. The fact that Splitgate supports crossplay between PlayStation/Xbox consoles and PC has probably helped to keep matchmaking times low even though the game has had such surprising player numbers thus far. Though Splitgate will remain in open beta for the forseeable future, it seems 1047 is working to ensure the portal shooter experience only gets better and better.
Splitgate is available now in open beta on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions also in the works.
Source: GameSpot
