Back to beta: What happened to Splitgate 2?

In a rare move for live service games and gaming in general, Splitgate 2 has “unlaunched”, reverting to beta just weeks after its debut in June 2025. There have been a few instances of studios pulling back their games; previous examples include The Culling 2, Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings, MultiVersus, and most recently, The Day Before. 

An emergency rollback in Splitgate 2’s case isn’t a graceful exit; it comes with controversies, flawed executions, and ambitious goals. Developer 1047’s free-to-play shooter with portals was released too soon, causing them to pull back the released game for a significant rebuild. What exactly went wrong with one of the most hyped shooters of 2025?

The first Splitgate game was a simple free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter with an incredibly catchy hook: what if Portal met Halo? Two Stanford students, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian, conceptualised the idea and started working on the game as a school project without any funding. Known back then as Splitgate: Arena Warfare or originally known as Wormhole Wars, the demo for the game drew 600,000 downloads in its first month of release.

The original Splitgate: Arena Warfare launched in 2019 on Steam and saw modest success on PC. Its popularity exploded in mid-2021 when an open beta release on consoles with cross-platform play attracted millions of players, so many that servers became overloaded. Suffering from success, the devs had to bring the server offline multiple times and worked to increase the server capacity. 

A fast-paced arena shooter that was reminiscent of Halo’s glory days but with a clever twist and fun modes? Players would naturally gravitate towards it, especially during the height of the pandemic. 

This unexpected surge allowed developer 1047 Games to secure major funding and expand its team. By late 2021, Splitgate’s full launch was delayed indefinitely to keep the beta running while the studio scaled up.

However, in September 2022, 1047 Games announced it would cease feature development on the original Splitgate and focus entirely on a new sequel set in the same universe. 

After careful consideration and much deliberation the 1047 Games team has determined that in order to build the game fans deserve – and to build it in a way that isn’t trying to retrofit and live operate an existing product – we are ending feature development of Splitgate.

We’re turning our attention away from iterative, smaller updates and going all-in to focus on a new game in the Splitgate universe which will present revolutionary, not evolutionary, changes to our game. It will be a shooter, it will have portals, and it will be built in Unreal Engine 5. Oh, and it will be free.

The original Splitgate would stay online in the meantime, but new content beyond bug fixes would stop as the studio went all-in on the next game.

In July 2024, 1047 Games formally unveiled Splitgate 2 with a cinematic trailer. They confirmed a planned 2025 release on all major platforms with full cross-play and that it would launch free-to-play. 

After roughly two years of development, Splitgate 2 entered public testing in early 2025. On May 22, 2025, Splitgate 2 entered its open beta, announcing it with a lengthy blog post explaining its expansive features. Some of these include:

Unfortunately, the open beta’s kickoff was marred by serious technical problems. Within hours of going live, the Splitgate 2 servers ran into a variety of slowdowns across systems, prompting 1047 Games to take the beta offline temporarily. The outage was resolved after intensive work, and the beta was brought back online, but the rough start echoed the original Splitgate’s infamous server overloads and dampened some early enthusiasm.

Those who did play the beta were generally positive about it, but loyal fans of the original were left disappointed. The core gunplay was serviceable, the momentum-based movement needed more polish, and the graphics were technically a step above the original but lacked visual flair to keep it distinct.

However, veterans lamented that portal usage, the game’s selling point, was de-emphasised in many maps that featured fewer portal-viable surfaces. Additionally, the introduction of hero-shooter style classes, abilities, and pre-made loadouts marked a departure from the arena-based design of the original.

Splitgate 2 was fun, but from the beginning, it showed that it lost touch with its roots. Regardless, it was clear to everyone that it needed more time to cook in the beta.

On June 6, 2025, Splitgate 2 version 1.0 was officially launched on all major platforms. The abrupt transition to the full release was swift following its short one-month open beta. This aligned with the Summer Game Fest, featuring a showcase that may go down as one of the worst in gaming history.

During the live SGF presentation on launch day, CEO Ian Proulx took the stage to promote Splitgate 2. Wearing a cap that says “Make FPS Great Again” in big printed letters, he took a dig at Call of Duty and wished for the return of Titanfall 3. Proulx went on to announce the immediate availability of Splitgate 2 battle royale, accompanied by a trailer set to an Imagine Dragons song.

On launch, the game peaked at 25,000 concurrent players on Steam, not counting those playing from console. The core gameplay of Halo with portals was still an exciting pitch that got players hopping online to try it. However, the game was haunted by its bad reputation and many in-game problems, which caused its player count to plummet.

The expectations Splitgate 2 set for themselves by bashing their competition put them in a bad light when it came to their issues. Aggressive monetisation and a bundle that cost $80 (slashed from $145) was immediately reduced to half. Then, Proulx took to Twitter to apologise and blamed the former head of monetisation, who he needed to point out came from Call of Duty. What made matters worse is that daily, weekly, and battle pass challenges weren’t tracking properly, which made progression frustrating.

The battle royale highlighted the game’s very broad scope, unlike the original’s tight focus on arena shooter modes. Splitgate 2 now packs in everything from small 4v4 modes and a map editor to massive multi-team battles and a battle royale. In an interview, Proulx would later say they were “too ambitious” and getting each core playlist done “80% instead of one or two things 100% of the way there.”

Shadow dropping the game by announcing its battle royale mode made a strong impression that it was its main mode, which doesn’t bode well for gamers exhausted with the genre. This was another slap in the face of fans of the first game, who were still betrayed by the lacklustre factions (hero classes), loadouts, and anti-portal map layouts.

The content overload split its small playerbase, creating uneven matches and a lack of polish and refinement. Additionally, there were also rotating game modes on top of the core playlist. Players, especially casual ones, loved the No Portal game mode and wished it were permanent. 

Not allowing players to choose how they play is one issue, but the fact that many players would rather play without portals, the game’s selling point, is concerning. Much like Fortnite’s popular Zero Build Mode, portals create a wide skill gap exacerbated by the poor matchmaking. 

Dedicated players can create dizzying portal combinations that make them difficult to track and enable them to shoot from unexpected angles. While a bit overtuned, a healthy playerbase and proper matchmaking would facilitate a gradual learning curve for the unique mechanic. It should be encouraged and built upon, because without it, the shooter is too generic to stand out in the saturated market.

The prevalence of bots and the lack of backfill were unfortunate measures against the dwindling playerbase, but starting a match with bots killed the enjoyment of the match. All of these preventable problems, along with many technical issues, indicated that the game needed to stay in beta for much longer, which is exactly what 1047 Games realised too late.

Approximately seven weeks after launch, 1047 Games made a drastic decision to “unlaunch” Splitgate 2 and revert it to a beta state. On July 23, 2025, the studio released a remarkably candid public statement addressing the community. 

In it, the developers openly acknowledged their mistakes in handling the game, rushing features, and failing to deliver a polished product that fans loved about the original game. 1040 games plans to do this by “reworking progression from the ground up, adding more portals to our maps, simplifying monetisation, refocusing on classic game modes you’ve been asking for, and more.”

Splitgate 2 returned to a playable beta, released Chapter 3 of their battle pass on a later date, and plans to stay quiet until early 2026. Alongside the rollback, 1047 Games announced a painful downsizing to streamline operations during the rebuild, laying off staff members. 

Further cutting budget, the original Splitgate paid the price and was shutdown to save on expenses and free up manpower, citing that it “cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past couple of years”. However, they are exploring the possibility of adding offline or peer-to-peer modes in the future. 

Splitgame had a niche but loyal fanbase that craved a proper arena shooter in a market saturated with hero shooters and battle royales. Much to its detriment, the sequel made the mistake of chasing trends and creating another generic shooter, losing what made it so special in the process. 

The bad PR impressions already turned off prospective gamers, but the aggressive monetisation, content overload, and betrayal of the core playerbase caused the remaining players to drop the game.

1047 Games is a refreshingly honest and transparent studio (even if it does backfire from time to time), and they have been active on social media, updating their progress. The playable beta is the perfect testing ground for their prospective changes, and they have a loyal playerbase who wants them to succeed.

Splitgate showed the world that there’s an audience clamouring for a good arena shooter, and they have the perfect platform to eventually capture the same audience.