When Ian Proulx and his colleagues at 1047 fully released Splitgate in 2021, his expectations for the multiplayer shooter “Halo with Portals” were completely in check. He expected it to do well enough over time, and hoped for slow and steady growth. At the time, 1047 was under 20 people and just four engineers.
“But it was like, no, this is your moment, everything is on fire,” Proulx says.
Splitgate exploded far beyond Proulx ever expected or what his small indie team could handle. It peaked, he says, at about two million daily active users, and the team spent the next few months in “firefight mode” trying to keep the game stable amid the surging interest.
Fortunately for Proulx and 1047, Splitgate was a financial success for the team. In addition, the positive reception to the game allowed 1047 to raise an additional $100 million from investors. Initially, they expected to put that money toward building and maintaining Splitgate. But in conversation after conversation, Proulx and his colleagues found that their ambitions would have to be curbed by the technical limitations of the game and the limitations of the team’s personnel.
“When you’re making an indie game, it’s really about finding your niche, doing a few things really well,” Proulx says. “But then you have to cut corners, because you don’t have the resources of a Call of Duty. And so we were like, Wow, we’re licking our lips. We were like, Man, we don’t have to cut corners like that. What if we could do it all over again?”
That’s exactly what 1047 decided to do. In 2022, the team announced that they would end active development of Splitgate in favor of building Splitgate 2.
“We know what Splitgate does well, and we know where it falls short,” Proulx explains. “And we also felt like our goal was to build one of the greatest shooters in the world. We want to compete with Call of Duty, Apex, Fortnite. And we felt like we were never going to get there by iterating on Splitgate.”
A new path
Today, 1047 officially announced that Splitgate 2 will launch sometime in 2025 on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, with a first cinematic trailer that shows off the sequel’s vibe and introduces the factions. Starting today, fans can download a Splitgate 2 Companion App, which includes a free digital comic series that develops the universe’s lore, quizzes, collectible digital cards, and other activities. And 1047 is planning a community playtest later this year, sometime around Gamescom.
Proulx tells me that Splitgate 2 is still fundamentally Splitgate: It’s still a free-to-play (with only cosmetic microtransactions, Proulx assures us), first-person shooter with 4v4 combat. It’s still a shooter where players play with portals and physics to fling themselves or their enemies around at wild angles and speeds. The biggest difference between the sequel and its predecessor is the introduction of three distinct factions, each geared toward a different playstyle or strategy. 1047 isn’t saying much about the specifics of these factions for now, though today’s cinematic trailer offers some clues as to what vibes are on offer. Proulx loves lore, which is why he channeled his love of old Halo novels into the Splitgate 2 companion comic as a way to define the game’s art style, characters, and factions for the audience ahead of the game’s release. He tells me that the three pillars he wants his team to strive for are “positive,” “sportsmanship,” and “future.”
“We’re not killing each other to save humanity or defeat evil,” he says. “It’s a sport. And you see that in the lore, in the art style. You saw a tiny bit of that in Splitgate, because that was always my original vision, I wanted it to be a sport.”
Aside from the addition of factions, Proulx says the most noticeable difference between Splitgate 1 and 2 is the map design. In Splitgate, he tells me, he ended up more or less defaulting to map design. But for Splitgate 2, he hired professionals.
“I had no idea what I was doing [in Splitgate 1]”, he says. “Some of [the maps] are okay, but we have actual level designers now who are phenomenal. And they’re also, not only are they way better than me, but it’s just our process. Everyone’s iterating, we’re testing, we just have a much more iterative process. We’re not afraid to test a map and throw it away and start over. And so what we end up with, I think, is by far our best maps ever. But also just a lot more current direction and thought that went into the maps.”
For example, he says that in the original game, the walls that players could place portals on were “kind of randomly placed.” But now, with the combined experience and player data they’ve used over the years, the team has a better understanding of what kinds of placements work well and what don’t. As a result, there are fewer portal walls in Splitgate 2 than there were in 1, but their placement is more considered.
“Splitgate was much more of an arena shooter, fast-paced, very circular,” Proulx added. “With this next game, it’s much more of a class-based shooter or arcade shooter, where it’s still fast-paced. It’s still shooting people and portals, but it’s a little more deliberate, it’s a little more strategic. The angles are a little more deliberate and less chaotic.”
In some ways, Proulx and his studio have dodged an industry bullet. They raised enough funding to make Splitgate 2 before the recent industry funding crisis, and were able to scale 1047 from fewer than 20 people to more than 170 with senior talent from games like Call of Duty and God of War: Ragnarok. And during that time, Proulx has been obsessed with live operations, preparing the team and Splitgate 2 to handle whatever comes during launch days and weeks. He also has a two-year roadmap for future updates, though he expects that will inevitably change based on community feedback. Whatever happens when Splitgate 2 launches next year, this time around, Proulx will be prepared.
“The dream really is to build the best shooter in the world,” he says. “That’s something I’m going to fight for forever. But I really think if we can make a game that all the Splitgate 1 fans love and stick with forever, but also broaden our scope so that people who never got to enjoy Splitgate can enjoy this game, that’s what success looks like to me.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.