One year after relaunch, Splitgate embraces its Halo Infinite rivalry

digitaltrends.com:

In our current age of live service games, it’s not unusual for an online multiplayer to radically evolve through updates. Fortnite, for instance, is a chimera that continues to turn itself inside out every few months. What is unusual, however, is for a game to launch, fail, and completely relaunch as a massive success years later. That’s exactly what happened with Spligate one year ago.

The multiplayer shooter, succinctly described as “Halo meets Portal,” launched to middling reviews and a low player base in 2019. While most studios may have cut their losses and moved on, developer 1047 Games decided to double down. The then-small team would spend two years improving the game and relaunch it in summer 2021, almost branding it as a new game entirely. The commitment paid off, as Splitgate suddenly picked up over 600,000 downloads in its first week and landed on game of the year lists come December.

The gaming landscape has changed in the one year since then. Most notably, Splitgate has gained some competition from the very shooter series it was inspired by: Halo. The development team at 1047 Games doesn’t see that as a problem, though. In an interview with Digital Trends, 1047 CEO Ian Proulx, explains that the secret to Splitgate‘s success has always been the team’s refusal to accept dead ends — a fitting philosophy for a game where you can always portal through any roadblock and keep moving.

Have you ever had an ingenious idea for a game as a kid that you wished you could make? That’s how Splitgate started. Ian Proulx was just a high-schooler when he played Portal 2 and fantasized about the idea of a shooter with portals. Years later, while studying computer science at Stanford University, Proulx would do an independent