Splitgate: Arena Warfare is, as its name implies, a multiplayer arena shooter. It's been anticipated by competitive FPS players for years and has finally arrived. The official release date of Splitgate is July 27, but it launched in open beta on July 13. The response to Splitgate's launch has been more than developer 1047 Games could have expected. In fact, the open beta has been so popular that 1047 has had to go to the extreme length of taking Splitgate's servers down temporarily.
In a Twitter post shared on Monday, 1047 Games officially announced it was taking servers offline in order to deal with too many players and several ongoing optimization issues. Knowing that the news would disappoint Splitgate fans, 1047 promised "5 drops" as a reward for all those who participated in the multiplayer beta up to that point. The servers remain down two days later, however, as 1047 has discovered that the problems with Splitgate may take a bit more work than expected.
Then, in a post shared on Thursday, 1047 confirmed some frustrating news with fans. The idea is that the game's server, as it currently exists, will only be able to handle a maximum of 65,536 concurrent players. That cap was hit Wednesday night, when the servers had to be taken down. As such, server optimizations are being put to the side while 1047 works on a queue system in order to ensure the player cap is never reached.
The most recent message from 1047 states that the team doesn't want to "overpromise" but that it does want to continue being "as transparent as possible." With that in mind, the team is hard at work on the queue system and plans to have it working "shortly." After that, it plans to work on changing its current database implementation, assumedly so it can host many more than just 65,000 players concurrently.
To be clear, over 65,000 players is an astonishing amount in total. For comparison, only 12 games on Steam have reached more than 65,000 concurrent players in the past 24 hours. Those numbers would put Splitgate ahead of Destiny 2, Dead by Daylight, Final Fantasy 14, and Rocket League, at least on Steam. 1047 has a lot to be proud of.
It's also important to keep in mind that this is a beta for Splitgate. It's intended to be used to test out the arena shooter's servers, so that improvements can be made prior to launch. In that regard, it's a complete success. It may be frustrating for fans in the interim, but it means Splitgate's problems will be addressed sooner rather than later. Splitgate has a bright future, clearly. This is just another part of getting the game ready for launch.
Splitgate: Arena Warfare releases July 27 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.