The developer of Splitgate never expected its open crossplay beta to be so popular.
The free-to-play sci-fi competitive multiplayer shooter, which has been described as “Halo meets Portal”, launched an open crossplay beta on 13th July. This let PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One players all play with and against each other for the first time.
Splitgate has been knocking around on PC since May 2019 with a relatively small player base, but the crossplay beta sparked an explosion of popularity (to the tune of half a million downloads) that caused severe server problems. So severe, in fact, that developer 1047 Games was forced to take the beta offline.
According to a tweet, 1047 Games eventually discovered its database can only handle 65,536 concurrent players, which Splitgate hit two nights ago. 1047 Games then set to work on a queue system to cope with the sheer volume of players, with a long-term solution in the works.
We don’t want to over-promise anything but want to be as transparent as possible because we are learning a lot! We should have a queue system implemented shortly so 65k players can play, and we will work on changing our database implementation over the next 24 hours.
— Splitgate (@Splitgate) July 22, 2021
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In another tweet, 1047 Games described itself as “a small dev team with a total of four engineers”. And in a message to players published last night, 1047 Games said it had hired an additional back-end engineer to help – and committed to launch proper on 27th July.
An important message from 1047 Games on the current server situation:
P.S. We are happy to announce that we have hired an additional back-end engineer who starts tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/MKrJck6ItB
— Splitgate (@Splitgate) July 23, 2021
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“We are truly blown away,” 1047 Games said.
According to Steam Charts, Splitgate’s last 24-hours concurrent peak on Valve’s platform was 11,601, which suggests the bulk of the players are on console. Still, it’s a massive uptick on PC, where peak concurrents could only manage triple digits each month since July 2019.
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