The Splitgate beta has been taken offline after servers died when the game reached more than 65,000 concurrent players last night. The devs say this is an issue with their database and that they're working on a queue system as an interim solution.
Why was the Splitgate beta taken offline?
In a tweet sent last night, Splitgate developer 1047 Games said that after talking to Amazon Web Services, it had learned that its database was only capable of handling 65,536 players at once. The game hit that number last night and servers promptly died, so the team is "working on a queue system to let 65k people in" until the player limit can be removed. The devs say they should have a queue system up and running "shortly" so 65,000 players can get into the game, and that they'll be working on their database implementation in the next day or so. That said, they also said they didn't want to "over-promise anything", as they're a small team.
As 1047 Games points out, it's a small outfit with just 4 engineers working on the technical side of things. Since the start of the game's beta, Splitgate has had over 600,000 downloads, which gels with its 65k concurrent player count. After a difficult time of trying to get everything back online, 1047 decided to take the game's beta down yesterday, promising 5 drops as "a token of our appreciation" for players' patience and understanding. Looks like if you're itching to get back into the Splitgate beta, you'll just have to wait for more updates.
What is Splitgate?
Splitgate should probably win an award for the most intriguing elevator pitch; its official website bills it as "Halo meets Portal". It's a multiplayer PvP shooter that pits teams against one another and allows them to fire portals around the map to change the pace of play and increase mobility. Splitgate originally launched on Steam as a free-to-play game back in 2019, and it entered its open beta phase a couple of weeks ago on consoles. It's launching for Xbox consoles and PlayStation platforms on July 27th.
We've reached out to the Splitgate developers for comment on this story. There's no word yet on a timeline for when they plan to have the game back online; they simply urge players to have patience and stick with them while they work on it. Have some sympathy for the developers; the 4 engineers are working on "about 2-3 hours [sleep] per night" as they try to fix the problem. Hopefully, the beta will be back online shortly. We'll bring you more on this as we get it.
Are you trying to play the Splitgate beta? What do you think of the game? Let us know in the comments below!
