Well guess they failed to make FPS Great Again.
an effort to revamp its sequel after launching the game “too early,” according to CEO Ian Proulx
The problem wasn’t just launching the game too early with little content. The entire games identity changed, as it got hero shooter elements to it. And it had a Battle Royal mode, not sure if it was the only mode at launch; because the game was not playable on Linux (which upset me personally and I never gone back because of that, even if they supported it later). And from what I read back then, the monetization wasn’t great too. And on top of it, they did what Overwatch 2 did and discontinued the first game. Ah and lets not forget that each character had no personality, and looked like random generated assets.
All of this upset the existing player base (including me), without winning any new. Now imagine a game launching too early with not enough content. If that was the only issue, it would still be bad. Now add all the other issues I listed on top of it, and you understand why the game hard flopped.
I played splitgate 1 and 2 since the beginning (and I am still checking it out sometimes).
My feeling is that they launched too early and they wasted too much time on their battle royale mode, probably trying to attract
compulsive spenderskids.Linux got added shortly after launch, before BR got added if I remember right, which is fair for a beta/early access. But IMHO it went out of beta way too quickly, before they fixed many of the complaints. When they realized they fucked up, they went back into beta and tried to relaunch later (weird move, and probably turned off many of the remaining players).
IMHO the game problem is that they made it revolve a lot around BR, with not enough map variety for normal arena modes. They clearly wanted BR to be the mode everyone plays most. The arena maps had a distinct lack of portal surfaces, and BR was also weird with a limited amount of portals available, which defeats the game’s selling point. The fans of the game also wanted an arena shooter, not another fortnite.
Nowadays arena is much better with more maps (they brought back some of the splitgate 1 maps), progression is no longer locked in strange ways and more modes are there.
It’s a shame they failed so badly that they had to lay off people.
Thanks for the quick summary. So my memory was not completely off the rails. :D This is really sad, because I loved Splitgate 1. I also remember the user comments that the game didn’t look much different in the first trailers before gameplay. Because the team said they will redo the game from scratch, as the original game was never intended to be a big game and reached its limit to what they can do in the engine. I was completely onboard with that explanation to why they needed to built it from scratch as sequel.
Yes, such a shame. I really wanted them to succeed.
