When Ian Proulx and his colleagues at 1047 launched Splitgate in 2021, his expectations for the multiplayer shooter “Halo with Portals” were well-controlled. He expected the game to sell quite well over time and hoped for slow, steady growth. At the time, 1047 had fewer than 20 people and only four engineers.
“But it was like, no, this is your moment now, everything is on fire,” Proulx says.
Splitgate was a success far beyond what Proulx could have imagined or what his small indie team was prepared to handle. According to him, the game peaked at two million daily active users, and the team spent the next few months in “firefighting mode” trying to keep the game stable despite the surge in interest.
Fortunately for Proulx and 1047, Splitgate was a financial success for the team. Additionally, 1047 was able to raise an additional $100 million from investors thanks to the game’s positive reception. Initially, they expected to invest that money into creating and maintaining Splitgate. But as they continued their conversations, Proulx and his colleagues realized that they had to keep their ambitions in check due to the game’s technical constraints and the team’s staffing constraints.
“When you’re making an indie game, you really have to find your niche and do a few things really well,” Proulx says. “But you have to cut corners, because you don’t have the resources that a Call of Duty has. And so at the time, we were like, ‘Wow, we’re licking our chops.’ We were like, ‘We don’t need 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 were ending active development of Splitgate in the interest of building Splitgate 2.
“We know what Splitgate does well and what it does poorly,” Proulx says. “And we also felt like our goal was to create one of the biggest shooters in the world. We want to compete with Call of Duty, Apex, and Fortnite. And we didn’t feel like we could do that by continuing to iterate on Splitgate.”
A new trajectory
Today, 1047 officially announced that Splitgate 2 will be coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox in 2025, with a first cinematic trailer showcasing the sequel’s atmosphere and introducing its factions. Starting today, fans can download a Splitgate 2 companion app, which includes a series of free digital comics expanding on the universe’s story, quizzes, digital collectible cards, and other activities. And 1047 is planning a community playtest later this year, around Gamescom.
Proulx tells me that Splitgate 2 is still fundamentally Splitgate: it’s still a free-to-play first-person shooter (with only cosmetic microtransactions, Proulx assures me), with 4-on-4 combat. It’s still a shooter in which players play with portals and physics to launch themselves or their enemies at incredible angles and speeds. The biggest difference between the sequel and its predecessor is the introduction of three different factions, each suited to a different playstyle or strategy. 1047 isn’t saying much about the specifics of those factions just yet, though today’s cinematic trailer offers some hints at what the game will be like. Proulx loves history, which is why he channeled his love of old Halo novels into the Splitgate 2 companion comic to define the art style, characters, and factions for audiences ahead of the game’s release. He tells me the three pillars he wants his team to aim for are “positive,” “athletic,” and “future.”
“We’re not killing each other to save humanity or to defeat evil,” he says. “It’s a sport. And that’s reflected in the story, in the art style. You see a little bit of that in Splitgate, because that was my initial vision: I wanted it to be a sport.”
Aside from the addition of factions, Proulx says the most notable difference between Splitgate 1 and 2 is the map design. In Splitgate, he told me, he found himself the map designer somewhat by default. But for Splitgate 2, he hired professionals.
“I had no idea what I was doing[in Splitgate 1],” he says. “Some of them are okay, but now we have real level designers who are phenomenal. And not only are they way better than me, but it’s just our process. Everybody iterates, we test, we have a much more iterative process. We’re not afraid to test a map, throw it away, and start over. And so what we ended up with is, I think, by far our best maps ever. But also a lot more direction and thought put into the maps.”
For example, he explains, the walls on which players could place portals were placed “pretty randomly” in the original game. But now, thanks to experience and data from players who have used them over the years, the team has a better understanding of what type of placement works well and what doesn’t. As a result, there are fewer portal walls in Splitgate 2 than in 1, but their placement is more deliberate.
“Splitgate was more of an arena shooter, fast-paced and very circular,” Proulx adds. “With this next game, it’s more of a class-based shooter or an arcade shooter, but it’s still fast-paced. It’s still shooting people and teleporting, but it’s a little more thoughtful, a little more strategic. The angles are a little more intentional and less chaotic.”
Proulx and his studio have, in some ways, avoided a shot in the industry’s foot. They amassed enough funding to make Splitgate 2 before the industry’s recent funding crisis, and were able to grow the 1,047-person team from fewer than 20 to more than 170 with veteran talent from games like Call of Duty and God of War: Ragnarok. And all the while, Proulx has been obsessing over live operations, preparing the team and Splitgate 2 to handle whatever will happen in the days and weeks of launch. He also has a two-year roadmap for future updates—though he expects that to inevitably change based on community feedback. Whatever happens when Splitgate 2 launches next year, this time, Proulx is ready.
“My dream is really to create the number one shooter in the world,” he says. “That’s what I’m going to fight for forever. But I think we really need to be successful in creating a game that all the fans of Splitgate 1 will love and keep forever, but also broaden our reach so that people who never had the chance to enjoy Splitgate can also enjoy this game. That’s what success would look like to me.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior journalist at IGN. Have a story idea for us? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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