I think this sufficiently checks all the boxes for a complete disaster: 1047 Games has announced that it will revert portal FPS Splitgate 2 back to beta, lay off an unspecified number of employees, and will shut down the Splitgate 1 servers next month. The sequel launched not even two months ago on June 6, 2025.
“We’ve heard your feedback and we agree with you: we launched too early,” co-founders Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian explained in a lengthy post on X. “We had ambitious goals with Splitgate 2, and in our excitement to share it with you, we bit off more than we could chew. We rushed certain features, made some boneheaded mistakes, and most importantly – we didn’t give you the polished, portal-filled mayhem you fell in love with.”
Among those boneheaded mistakes was Ian Proulx’s appearance at Summer Game Fest, where the CEO surprise launched Splitgate 2’s battle royale mode while wearing a MAGA parody hat promising to “Make FPS Great Again.” He clarified that the hat was not a political statement before eventually sort of apologizing.
Splitgate 2 will undergo a rebuilding phase set to last “until early next year”, then it’ll return with reworked progression, more portals, “simplified” monetization, and a larger focus on classic game modes requested by the community.
The sudden pivot to reworking the game is the reason Proulx and Bagamian say they’ve decided to lay off an unspecified number of developers at the studio. “They’re receiving severance and job placement support, and we’re committed to doing everything we can to help them through this transition,” they said. “We hope to bring them back when we can.”
To the Splitgate community,We believe in Splitgate 2. This game means everything to us – it’s been our life for almost 10 years, starting in our dorm room, and we’re more committed than ever to delivering the incredible experience you deserve.We’ve heard your feedback, and we…July 22, 2025
As part of the downsizing, 1047 is planning to shut down Splitgate 1 servers next month.
“While we’d love to keep servers online indefinitely, it’s cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past couple of years, and we have to prioritize our team,” they said. The studio heads say they’re “exploring the possibility of supporting offline or peer-to-peer matches,” but that they plan to deliver on the “promise of the original” in the reworked Splitgate 2 when it eventually re-releases.
Fans on the Splitgate subreddit seem to be taking the news surprisingly well and are eager to see the game improved, but some users are pointing out the similarities to this announcement and other recent live service games.
A few brought up Multiversus, a free-to-play fighting game that launched in 2022 as an open beta and was taken offline a year later to prep for its final release. The long absence didn’t help MultiVersus when it properly launched last year, as publisher Warner Bros. Games turned around and decided to shut it down in May.
And even if Splitgate 2 won’t be a new addition to the live service graveyard, Splitgate 1’s sacrifice doesn’t feel much different than the way Blizzard handled releasing a sequel to Overwatch.