Splitgate Delays Launch As More Funding Comes In To Augment Overloaded Servers

We first learned about portal-based shooter Splitgate: Arena Warfare when it launched into beta in May 2019. It's been a relatively quiet two years since then, with the game only playing host to a few hundred concurrent players in the months following its debut.

Suddenly, though, Splitgate is all the rage, and it's grown so big that even its creator, 1047 Games, can't get a handle on it.

As its Steam Charts shows, Splitgate rocketed up from a peak of 954 players in June to 14,625 in July -- and that's just on Steam. The beta is also available on consoles, and it's had so many players in recent weeks that 1047 literally couldn't meet the demand:

Good news! We have broken through our 65k concurrent player limit and have hit a new peak!

Bad news: a new bottleneck has been found in our servers. We're on it right now. Hang on as we reset the servers.

Reminder: you have not lost ANY progress🙏

— Splitgate (@Splitgate) July 25, 2021

That bottleneck was just a matter of numbers. The Splitgate server could only handle 65,536 players -- which good computer science nerds will recognize as 2 to the 16th power -- and when the player count across all platforms exceeded that number, well, boom. As of this writing, on Tuesday afternoon, servers are just about ready to come back online. Unfortunately, the issues have caused the full launch, planned for today, to slip back into an unspecified date in August.

That's not too much of a problem because, frankly, 1047 Games doesn't need money from players right now. The developer recently announced that it had secured an additional $10 million in funding, on top of the $6.5 million it got in May, which 1047 said will help it "expand our dev team/increase server capacity." It will probably also manage to cover the costs of whatever kind of post-launch party the company wants to throw.