What a surprising success for an arena shooter: Splitgate lured last on Steam almost 60,000 simultaneously active players on! This is on a par with big names like Ark: Survival Evolved or Rainbow Six: Siege and catapulted Splitgate into the top 10 most played titles on Steam.
And that, although the developers are currently still completely overwhelmed with the number of players. This is how they add up Waiting times for a match can be as long as 90 minutes. Still, players seem to like to queue up for Splitgate.
Patience is also advised: Due to the current lack of servers, the developers have to postpone the full release of Splitgate first.
What the reasons for the hype are, what problems the developers have and how things should go on with the first person shooter, we summarize here for you.
What happened?
Splitgate appeared in a revised version in July 2021, initially as a beta version on PC and consoles, before the full release should take place on July 27th. But it didn’t get that far.
The rush of gamers to the free-to-play arena shooter far exceeded the developers’ expectations. Accordingly, there was simply not enough server capacity available to accommodate all players.
Link to Twitter content
In the meantime, Splitgate went completely offline, but has now been restarted. And the hype on the PC was even bigger, so that almost 60,000 simultaneously active players (via Steamcharts.com) were measured. The developers stated a waiting time of up to 90 minutes in order to be able to play Splitgate.
This trailer shows you what the gameplay of Splitgate looks like:
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Splitgate: Futuristic multiplayer shooter shows gameplay in the trailer
Where does the hype come from?
Arena shooters are currently considered a very risky genre for developers. Many big names like Lawbreakers and the new edition of Unreal Tournament have failed in the past, a Quake Champions is crawling around with three-digit player numbers on Steam.
Splitgate breaks this supposed curse with its colorful mix of fast firing and tactical portals. Important factors for success are:
Splitgate is fun: Players report on Steamthat they have a lot of fun with the fluid, fast and tricky gameplay of the multiplayer shooter. Both the weapon handling, the portals, the level design and the variety of modes are met with a lot of approval in the Steam ratings from players.
The game is free to play: Anyone interested can take a look at the Free2Play title without obligation. Splitgate is financed through a battle pass and cosmetic microtransactions for weapon skins and player models – in addition to the colorful look, another parallel to the extremely successful Fortnite.
Splitgate doesn’t need a strong PC: The hardware requirements are very frugal. A dual-core CPU, a graphics card at the level of a Geforce GTX 660 and 6 GB of RAM are sufficient.
The game works on Twitch: Thousands of viewers give the game a high level of visibility, especially among younger players.
Splitgate – view screenshots
What’s next?
Splitgate should be stable as soon as possible and leave the waiting times behind. The developers announced that more servers will be made available – but this will take time. In the long term, well over 100,000 simultaneously active players should be possible.
As soon as the technical hurdles have been overcome, the game should appear as a full version. The release date was roughly the August 2021 called.
The server engineer from developer 1047 Games explains how difficult it is to master the situation using a graphic comparison with a restaurant:
Link to YouTube content
The developers recommend all players who expect a smooth gaming experience to wait until the full release. On its own Twitter-Kanal interested parties can find out about the current status of the Splitgate servers. There is also one official Discord channel.
