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Splitgate dev forced to take the beta offline because it was too popular

Splitgate developers decided to shut down the beta while they work on a way to handle all the demand.

In an unusual move, Splitgate developer 1047 Games has taken the game's incredibly popular beta offline after it reached over 65,000 concurrent players.

Splitgate is a multiplayer shooter with a unique mix of Halo's gunplay and feel, and Portal's, well, portals. It has been available on Steam since 2019, just recently entered open beta on PC as well as consoles (with cross-play), which caused a massive spike in player interest. Over 600,000 new players checked the game out in just a few days, according to the the developer, which strained systems in a way the team simply had not anticipated.

After a night of instability and constant updates on Twitter, 1047 Games decided to simply take the beta offline to work on scaling up its systems.

1047 Games explained that its database was built to handle 65,536 concurrent players, which the game surpassed last night, causing connectivity problems and other sorts of issues. The four-person team initially attempted working on optimisations to help mitigate the effect, but later realised the problem is too big to be fixed over the course of brief maintenance downtime.

"We wish we could just throw money at the problem and buy more servers but there are a lot of moving parts and scaling is an incredibly complicated issue that takes time," 1047 Games wrote.

Right now, the team is working on a queue system that'll help manage this influx of players until the database limitation has been removed. When that's been implemented, the Splitgate beta will come back online - which should be sometime today.

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Sherif Saed

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Sherif (he/him) is VG247’s go-to shooter and Souls-likes person. Whether it’s news, reviews, or op-eds – Sherif is always eager to tell you about video games. He's one of VG247's most veteran writers, with 10+ years experience on the site.

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