Things have gone from bad to worse for Splitgate 2. The portal-based sci-fi multiplayer shooter has been bleeding players and continues to face negative Steam reviews, as fans clamor for basic features like leaderboards and balk at the free-to-play live service’s microtransaction prices. As a result, 1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx announced on Tuesday that the team is taking a step back to hopefully relaunch a better version of Splitgate 2 in 2026 and making some tough choices in the meantime.
“It’s brutal, but we’re not going away,” he told IGN. “We’re not quitting. We absolutely love this. We love every single part about it, the good and the bad. And we’ve been here before and we’ve come out the other end, and we’re going to just keep doing what we can to stay alive.” That means suspending new content plans for the game after season 3 while the team works on overhauling core parts of the design, killing the servers for Splitgate 1, and laying off more staff.
The major pivot comes a week after a thread on the game’s subreddit asked fans to do some soul searching about why they’ve stopped playing Splitgate 2 and what could one day bring them back. Some players complained about basic stuff like not being able to pick game modes when they queue. Others were more turned off by the sequel’s departure from the arena-shooter roots of the original. “I found Splitgate 1 more fun. It scratched the Halo itch for me. Splitgate 2 no longer does that because it has heroes, loadouts and attachments,” one wrote.
From the variety of responses and preferences, it’s clear there’s not one or two obvious things that can turn the shooter’s fortunes around, which is why Proulx says the studio is going to work on a soft reboot instead, similar to how it did with the original Splitgate. “I think there’s a lot of things Splitgate 2 does extremely well,” he told Polygon. “I think we have a very polished actual core experience in terms of gun gunplay movements, graphics, et cetera. But I do feel like we bit off more than we could chew, and we have three games in one between Arena and Battle Royale and our own Map Creator.”
One big area of criticism at launch as Splitgate 2's microtransactions, which many players felt were overreaching and too expensive, even after some prices were brought down. Anyone who did already spend money on the game won’t be getting a refund either. All of those cosmetics will continue to be available throughout this year and presumably once the game relaunches in 2026, but anyone who’s already sunk a good chunk of change into Splitgate 2 at launch might feel a bit burned. The likely alternative, however, could mean the game and studio shutting down entirely.
That will be the case for Splitgate 1 at least, whose roughly 100 concurrent players on Steam will soon be heading into their final matches. 1047 also wouldn’t confirm the number of new layoffs to Polygon, but confirmed more are on the way following a small round in June. And then there’s the dumb “Make FPS Great Again” MAGA hat Proulx wore to kick things off when announcing Splitgate 2's battle royale mode during Summer Game Fest Live while ICE protests were going on elsewhere in LA.
He initially defended it and said he wouldn’t apologize. He later did walk it back but pointed to Death Stranding 2 director Hideo Kojima wearing a similar one at some point and not getting any flack for it. “Yes, I definitely would’ve done things differently,” he told IGN. “I will say I think we would be in the position we’re in regardless of any of that stuff. Obviously, I don’t think that stuff helped us, and I don’t plan on doing any more stunts like that, but I think the reality is if this was a 10 out of 10 game, people would still be playing it and happily spending money and grinding and telling their friends, and that’s my feeling. And so I think the past is the past, and we’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
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