Success of Splitgate's Open Beta Forced Devs to Shut Down Servers
Cross-play has brought Splitgate a surge in popularity. The open beta testing this feature attracted so much interest that a decision was made to temporarily shut down the game servers. Currently the game is back online.
In May 2019, the online free-to-play FPS Splitgate, or, as the developers themselves describe it, "a meeting of Halo and Portal”. At the time, the game did not meet with too much interest and for two years the player base was counted at most in the hundreds. However, the situation changed dramatically on July 13, when the devs launched an open beta offering cross-play. Then the title arrived on PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and its popularity grew to such an extent that the developers had to shut down the servers.
Over the past three days employees from 1047 Games responsible for the game published a series of posts that inform about the situation. According to them, the title has been downloaded more than 500,000 times, and such a high interest caused problems with the servers. The situation was so serious that during the night from July 21 to 22 they decided to shut them down to make some repairs.
The result of the shutdown was only the discovery of the source of the problem - the fact that the servers at the start of the beta could accommodate 65,536 players at the same time. Work to fix the issue continued. Just a few hours ago the devs has reported that a new record was set for the number of simultaneously active users. This may suggest that the inconvenience has been resolved.
At the hottest moment Splitgate on PC was played by a maximum of 12,600 players (via SteamDB). This indicates that the game caught mainly the interest of console users.
