Following its surprise launch in June, Splitgate 2 is now “unlaunching.” The multiplayer first-person shooter will remain online in a beta state and continue to get support through a season 3 update and bug fixes, but developer 1047 Games is otherwise pausing its planned roadmap to overhaul the project ahead of a relaunch in early 2026. The studio is also cutting an unspecified number of staff members and shutting down servers next month for the original Splitgate as cost-cutting measures.
“Basically, I feel like we missed the mark, and I don’t think that’s a secret,” 1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx told Polygon in a video interview ahead of today’s announcement.
Splitgate 2 launched on June 6 following a controversial announcement at this year’s Summer Game Fest, in which Proulx took to the stage wearing a “Make FPS Great Again” hat. While that moment generated heat for the studio, the game itself was met with negative feedback of its own from its community who voiced criticism of its bugs, its lack of a ranked mode at launch, expensive cosmetics, and more. Today, 1047 Games released a statement addressing those concerns and detailing the future of Splitgate, its sequel, and the studio at large.
“We’ve heard your feedback, and we agree with you: we launched too early,” the note to the game’s community reads. “We had ambitious goals with Splitgate 2, and in our excitement to share it with you, we bit off more than we could chew … So, we’re going back to beta.”
Speaking with Polygon, Proulx pinned some of Splitgate 2’s problems on a lack of community involvement in areas. Despite holding extensive playtests before launch, modes like Battle Royale were kept close to the chest to surprise players. 1047 Games intends to work closer with players moving forward, returning to the original Splitgate’s more grassroots development cycle.
“There was a giant Reddit thread that we literally read every single post,” Proulx said. “I read everything on the Reddit, everything, any tweets, Discord, all that stuff. We have a good sense of what needs to get done, what are the problems. Still tons of details to figure out, but I think the big change we’re going to make this time around is we’re going to actually do it alongside the community, get their feedback, playtest, and then when we feel like, all right, the game, it’s in a great place, it’s what it needs to be, that’s when we’re going to relaunch as opposed to just doing things in secret and then surprising them.”
1047 Games has a list of feedback that it’s planning to add in the overhaul, including ranked leaderboards and more mode-specific playlists. It will add more portal walls to arenas, following criticisms that the sequel had deemphasized the series’ central mechanic. A game mode revamp is coming too, as 1047 will put less focus on round-based modes to recapture the original Splitgate’s flow.
“I think there’s a lot of things Splitgate 2 does extremely well,” Proulx said. “I think we have a very polished actual core experience in terms of gun gunplay movements, graphics, et cetera. But I do feel like we bit off more than we could chew, and we have three games in one between Arena and Battle Royale and our own Map Creator. And so we tried to do a lot with a little, and I think we ended up with a game that’s kind of like 80% of the way there times three instead of a 100% of the way there on fewer things.”
Proulx noted that monetization will be reworked as well. That comes after the game drew criticism for including an $80 skin bundle at launch, among other pricey cosmetics. (“Obviously that one bundle … I mean, I’m not here to make excuses … Yeah …” Proulx trailed off when I asked about the response to monetization.)
I’ve made many, many, many mistakes …
— Ian Proulx, CEO of 1047 Games
That controversy dovetailed with another surrounding the launch: Proulx’s now infamous Summer Game Fest stunt. The CEO came under scrutiny for sporting a hat that referenced U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, a move that happened as the current administration ramped up its deportation efforts with a wave of ICE raids – some mere blocks away from the YouTube Theater, the venue that hosted Summer Game Fest.
After initially standing behind the stunt as a non-political statement in an interview with IGN, Proulx has since apologized for it. Despite the scrutiny the moment generated, he affirmed that it didn’t have anything to do with the decision to unlaunch, though he still believes that that first-person shooter genre is not “in a great place right now.”
“Obviously the vibes are worse because of the hat, but, I think that if it was a 10 out of 10, feature-complete game that delivered on everything the community wanted, they would be playing it right now,” Proulx said.
“I’ve made many, many, many mistakes since we started this in January of 2017, and that’s one of them. And I’ve made so many more that the world doesn’t know about,” he added. “So, to me, it’s really just about moving forward, and I believe in this game, I believe in this team, and there’s tons of things I would do differently, that being one of them. But I’m focused on the future.”
As for what the “unlaunch” means for the game as it stands now, Splitgate 2 isn’t going away. The studio will forge ahead with a planned third season and will still run a few special events. Bug fixes are in the works, as well as quality-of-life improvements, like adding a playlist featuring player-made maps. Still, Proulx said that “95%” of the studio’s efforts will be spent on the relaunch. The team is targeting a rerelease window “as early as possible” in 2026, but Proulx said that an earlier window could be possible if the team was ready.
The studio will see layoffs as part of the change, but 1047 Games would not confirm the number of roles being reduced or say what departments would be impacted when asked by Polygon. This is the second wave of layoffs for the studio in the past two months, as the studio parted with a “small group” of staff members in June that included members of its art team.
The original Splitgate is getting caught up in the studio’s cost-cutting efforts too. 1047 Games will take the shooter’s servers down next month, though in the statement sent to its community today, noted that the studio is “exploring the possibility of supporting offline or peer-to-peer matches.”
This isn’t the first setback in Splitgate’s history. The original game first launched to middling reviews in 2019. 1047 Games would retool it over the next two years and pull off a successful relaunch in 2021. After staffing up with the goal of reworking the game from the inside out, the studio would then abruptly halt its plans one year later and pivot to developing a full sequel instead. Proulx is hopeful that Splitgate 2 will be able to retain the trust of a community who has seen the series’ direction morph several times in the past six years.
“We’ve been here before and we are as determined as ever,” Proulx said. “We’ve had much darker days with Splitgate where we almost quit, and I’m really glad we didn’t because 99% of this has been living the dream. So, we’re not going to quit. We are going to just absolutely grind this out and keep doing it and keep listening and make this game as amazing as possible.”
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