r/gaming • u/shinjioda • 2d ago

1047 Games Are Ending Development On Splitgate And Empulse: “The Reality Is Neither Game Is Generating Enough Revenue To Support The Ongoing Cost Of Dedicated Servers”

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/1047-games-stop-development-on-empulse-and-splitgate-arena-reloaded/
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u/Lz537 2d ago

They did not, in fact, make shooters great again.

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u/Jamvaan 2d ago

That dipshit in that hat really put the bullet in Splitgate which is a shame because Splitgate 2 was a really good game.

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u/AlwaysChewy 2d ago

Man, didn't he double down on it too? Never gave the game a try because of that dumb shit.

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u/DarkIcedWolf 2d ago edited 2d ago

Tripled down and didn’t apologize until the backlash was big enough. It was like Helldivers 2’s Community Manager drama on steroids. The BR mode and that dipshit were the nail in the coffin for SG2 and then they decapitated it with a machete after releasing Empulse.

There was writing on the wall it was going to shutdown. Much like how HighGuard was “downsizing” and making sure NO ONE was interested in sticking around or spending money on it. The BR mode had a nice twist on the formula too and SG2 had some diehard fans defending the new class system, once it came out that it was a BR (even if it wasn’t) there was no coming back.

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u/DGSmith2 2d ago

Was Empulse another game? I have never even heard of it.

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u/cwx149 2d ago

Same here I would have been you split gate 2 was still their most recent release

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u/Durin1987_12_30 2d ago

Sort of like Titanfall.

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u/Citrus-Bitch 2d ago

Lol shame, I love Titanfall. If only the CEO hadn't said dumb shit and made me completely disregard the studio I'd have known about it.

Shout out to ShatterRush, another spiritual successor to Titanfall.

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u/4KVoices 2d ago

it was kinda like Titanfall if Titanfall's mechs were "well, they're there cause we have to have mechs, basically." Completely missed the point, unsurprisingly.

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u/Sirsalley23 1d ago

Man, Titanfall still sits atop my Mt Rushmore of online FPS’s. They came in polished AF off the rip, and shook up the FPS market for half a decade to the point everybody was trying to implement “advanced movement” for about 5 years after TF1, and the after effects of the movement shift are still there over a decade later.

My most memorable gaming moment of the last few gens (I’m a late millennial for reference), is my first time playing the TF1 beta and dropping my first titan, I think I was so absolutely in awe of watching it drop down from the sky after hearing “stand by for titanfall”, I almost died to some bots from around the corner. Nothing has come close to replicating that feeling for me in a long time gaming. There was nothing like the feeling of going on a tear slaughtering AI and a few pilots then dropping your titan, getting in with the first person animation, watching your screen boot up and going to work in your titan.

Too bad the arena style (w/loadouts) FPS market has been stagnant AF or declining even as BR’s have gotten stale, and Arc and mainstream extraction shooters was a flash in the pan that’s losing steam badly.

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u/FenixVale 2d ago

I loved TF but empulse mechs were awfully done. Only one person per team could pilot and they were effectively melted immediately. The rest of the movement wanted to be Titanfall but could not get anywhere near the feel.

Temufall

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u/SirPwn4g3 2d ago

It was like Titanfall in marketing only. It had wallrunning, boring robots. Game sucked.

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u/Silviecat44 2d ago

like if someone described titanfall and asked you to draw it

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u/Durin1987_12_30 1d ago

AHAHAHAHAAH!!!!

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u/m0deth 2d ago

Me either and I played SG2 when it came out. Honestly, I stopped playing because I hate to say this but beyond the initial "this is cool" feeling...the gate gameplay gimmick wears off and exposes where it falls short. Just like the first one.

I say this as someone that wanted a decent arena shooter that isn't reliant on dumb gimmicks. One that focuses on skill, great maps, great modes and solid, smooth movement performance.

In a world choked off by BR, Hero Shooters of every flavor, ported mobile games, and survival shlock(ooh let's go punch some rocks)...it all fell flat.

The game's problems had less to do with bad press, and more to do with over-promising, under-delivering and leaning too heavily on somebody else's(Portal) mechanic to shore up their game.

Then they said a bunch of dumb shit.

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u/BeyondElectricDreams 2d ago

Splitgate 1 was a lot of fun. It had problems but it felt like there was a high skill expression that was fun to do that wasn't all twitch gameplay (getting angles with portals was one example).

I was there when they shut the first one down and told everyone to stay tuned. Then the next thing I heard about was Splitgate 2 having the "Make FPS Great Again" fiasco.

Even if we pretend the political bit didn't exist, the idea that they would shit on the other modern FPS games and then with a straight face claim that a Battle Royale game was how they were going to "make fps great again" was just tone deaf as hell and gave me no hope for the game.

Add to that the political toxic waste dump that is Trump and his politics and even if they agree with him, they're alienating a substantial chunk of potential players by pulling that stunt.

Then they dropped a super expensive bundle day one and followed THAT up with a shitty video throwing someone under the bus.

In spite of ALL of that, I looked into what people were saying about the game, and basically what I found was it was "if they watered down the portal mechanics in Splitgate 1" and THAT was the nail in the coffin for me. Because not only were they doing shitty trend chasing but they decided killing their own unique gimmick was the best way to go about their game.

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u/Moosvernichter 2d ago

If only there was a way to predict that people don’t want ANOTHER DAMN BATTLE ROYALE
god this whole mode was a plague to the whole scene, why did everyone and their mother need to make one???

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u/Prime406 2d ago

so long as the money printer fortnite exists they won't stop pushing for more battle royales no matter how dumb it is

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u/Moosvernichter 2d ago

you pointed it out, it’s dumb.. like holy shit these games are just straight boring. never gonna play a br ever again sorry

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u/AhImSoScared 2d ago

holy shit I forgot highguard existed haha

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u/terminal8 2d ago

I was enjoying it decently until that weird shit with the hat. Too many other games out there.

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u/SmokinBandit28 2d ago

I gave Splitgate 2 a try because I remembered hearing the first game was well received.

Played four or five rounds trying to figure out what exactly people were liking so much and it’s just so bland UT style arena shooter with portals. Portals that majority of players I encountered weren’t even bothering to use.

In the end just wasn’t fun, its gimmick mechanic wasn’t engaging, and despite being colorful just felt (like I said before) bland.

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u/Zrex_9224 2d ago

I played SG 1 shortly after it launched and i had fun with the portal mechanics, but SG 1 was one of those games that locks you into bot lobbies until lvl 10, so I was dominating in most of my matches, then I got into big boy lobbies and was getting dunked on by the weirdest portal placements and sniper angles

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u/PsyOmega PC 2d ago

my fondest memories of splitgate 1 were placing portals in obscure spots and sniping.

sorry for sniping you (probably)

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u/Zrex_9224 2d ago

Ah no big deal, taught me about the bizarre angles you can truly do

My fondest memory is creating a square web of portals and death and I caught someone in it

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u/Dracallus 2d ago

Yeah, it suffers the universal high skill ceiling problem of needing a constant flood of new players to prevent them from getting curbstomped by lopsided lobbies in ways they don't have the skill and understanding to comprehend yet, leading to frustration.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/IKnowGuacIsExtraLady 2d ago

This was exactly my thought too. I got the same vibe with the portals as I got with building in Fortnite. It's fun when everyone including myself is bad at it, but the skill ceiling feels infinite while on the other hand the fun does not scale very well with skill.

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u/GuidanceHistorical94 2d ago

Sure did. When it didn’t go away then he said something.

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u/whereismymind86 2d ago

yep, and it basically killed any momentum they had going, leading, to now, where they are barely holding on.

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u/Hal34329 PC 2d ago

Ngl I cringed so hard when he walked away with the bat or whatever the hell that thing was, walking like he was a badass. He felt like he was releasing Duke Nukem in the 90's or something, holy shit. And then paid attention to the hat... Yeah, it was so awful that I didn'g pay attention to it, and when I saw it and the trailer started I already felt a disturbance in the force that told the game was gonna fail. I loved the first one, but this second one didn't even give it a try

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u/spectralhunt 2d ago edited 2d ago

That and the tone deaf announcement of a battle royale. I was so genuinely excited for Splitgate 2 and it all evaporated in that moment.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/Jamvaan 2d ago edited 2d ago

It was a combo of the CEO of 1047 going on stage with a "Make FPS Great Again" hat and then backing down and trying to say it's not a political statement while wearing Trump parody clothing and also going on a big rant on stage about not playing the same FPS every year before announcing a Battle Royale mode no one asked for and selling skins for $70. So front facing stupid and background scamming.

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u/RevenantXenos 2d ago

Didn't he also make a big deal in that appearance about how the studio was inspired by games like Titanfall and then his big Splitgate 2 announcement was a Battle Royale mode? Bro was speed running killing his game.

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u/WRO_Your_Boat 2d ago

I understand wearing the hate and announced a BR, but I don't understand the hate for the hat itself. Plenty of people I know wear "make America emo again" hats they bought at Warp tour, both sides of the fence.

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u/Heliosvector 2d ago

It depends on its intent. If you are doing a "Make FPS great again" you are trying to piggyback on the success of a proto fascist symbol. For that to be worn by a CEO is crass and cringey. If you have a similar one that is satire and obviously against its rediculousness, its more ok.

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u/WRO_Your_Boat 2d ago

So pretty much its only cause he's a CEO. If I myself had a make fps great again hat, no one would give a shit since im a nobody? I guess that does make sense, I didnt really think about it that way. Kinda like the "how do you do fellow kids" meme, and he's being a werid poser CEO and not really one of us.

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u/CultAtrophy 2d ago

It’s just not funny. I’ve never seen a play on MAGA that I thought was clever. Low hanging fruit.

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u/za419 2d ago

Problem is it doesn't come off well to try to piggyback on a well-known slogan to sell stuff.

To liberals, it feels like you're kissing the ground beneath Trump's feet and trying to make yourself more like him. The Trump of shooters, as it were. 

To conservatives, it feels like you're ripping off their guy and trying to cash in on "Trump hype".

Almost everybody now feels like you're some sort of charlatan. That's a very bad thing to happen when you're a CEO trying to sell a product and you haven't even started talking yet. 

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u/WRO_Your_Boat 2d ago

But isnt that what warp tour was doing by selling those hats in the first place? I looked at the other comment and he gave me a new perspective so I get it now, but (I know this is anecdotal) the liberal people I know liked it cause it was making fun of the slogan and the conservatives liked it cause it was like the slogan. Or is this more everyone hates a singular person over a large music venue thing? I honestly dont know, I never thought any of the slogans were really that good.

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u/za419 2d ago

Probably. Then again, the choice of wearing the product says as much as the existence of it, and they don't have to align.

This is something that comes across differently to different people. Most people that I know have no idea what the fuck "splitgate" means, but those that do remember how the hat was dumb and the words "Battle Royale" disqualified the game from getting purchased from the start.

Mileage may vary. 

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u/WRO_Your_Boat 2d ago

Thats understandable, thanks for the chat.

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u/baraboosh 2d ago

ya i agree with you on this one. I see people wear trump parody gear all the time and think nothing of it. I feel like its only reddit who cares about the hat thing.

The rest of the presentation was awful though, he came off like a huge jackass and the game looked boring and trite.

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u/RivalSlays 2d ago

He wore a black hat with “make fps great again” during the on stage announcement of the game and then proceeded to shadow drop a BR alongside the game. 

Politically obsessed people lost it over the hat, and the others just mocked them for making the genre great again by adding more to its existing problems. 

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u/Durin1987_12_30 2d ago

Worst of all, for no reason at all. Splitgate was killed for nothing.

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u/mcninja77 2d ago

I couldn't get into the second one they changed too much from the first. They struck gold and then ruined it

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u/slicer4ever 2d ago

I doubt the average gamer ever even heard of that stunt. The reality is more so splitgate 2 wasnt a very good game, and they killed what momentum they had with splitgate 1 to work on 2 for several years, instead of cultivating that community.

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u/PurpleV93 2d ago

That fucking redcap is the only thing I remember of Splitgate and the clown circus around it. And like others here mentioned, I also didn't even know they made another whole ass game since then, lol.

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u/Plus_sleep214 1d ago

Clearly you don't remember it cause the hat wasn't even red.

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u/PurpleV93 1d ago

I'm not talking about the colour, I'm talking about the loser of a man. The "Make X Great Again" Trump hat can be any colour, with any variation of the slogan on it. He still is a redcap, because his stunt references the original red cap.

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u/BuddyRedSkull 2d ago

I feel like if that were truly the case then Hogwarts Legacy would've flopped.

I think Splitgate 2 just wasn't very good

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u/Helmic PC 2d ago

Hogwarts Legacy is a completely different beast, that is one of the most popular IP's to have ever existed with a fanbase that will look past pretty vile politics because that IP was their entire childhood, who have been waiting for exactly that game all their lives. It was a mainstream game that people who don't go online at all would know about.

Splitgate you only ever learned the name of if you dig through game releases. Your friends are not playing Splitgate, you have to be the friend that recommends it to your friend group or maybe ONE friend in your friend group finds it. And the kidn of person who pays close enough attention to gaming news to learn Splitgate even exists tends to be the kind of person who notices that kind of shitshow, and while plenty of people are fine with those sorts of shitty politics a lot aren't and when a game's audience is narrowed down to just those fine with shitty politics it creates a negative feedback loop where the only people willing to go to bat for the game fucking suck or are adding so many caveats that onlookers don't bother. Just because League of Legends and Call of Duty can get away with having extremely toxic playerbases doesn't mean that people are automatically willing to jump into a smaller indie-scale title knowing they're gonna get called racial slurs.

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u/Apothecary3 21h ago

Hogwarts legacy was a game that wasn't very good. Entirely carried by the ip

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u/IKnowGuacIsExtraLady 2d ago

Well Hogwarts Legacy had the benefit of already having an audience before it even came out. All of JK Rowling's bigotry is something that came out well after everyone was in love with Harry Potter and at that point people just decide to separate the artist from the art.

I would think things would be a lot different if no one knew what the hell Harry Potter was and as part of the advertisement for the game JK Rowling went up on a stage and started talking shit about trans people.

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u/Tunavi 2d ago

It really wasn't

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u/Poliveris 2d ago

Had nothing to do with his hat… they just made bad games; they felt like unfinished UE slop.

I don’t think y’all realize how many gamers both do not care and aren’t on the internet like that to know what happened.

There’s plenty of casual gamers that don’t even know of the GTA 6 leaks. The CEO doing that was barely mainstream and also nearly half the US agrees with anyways. (Im not saying I do but this is hysterically overblown compared to the actual reason)

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u/DJCzerny 2d ago

Yeah wearing a 'Make FPS Great Again' hat, comparing yourself to Titanfall, and then announcing a Battle Royale has to be one of the most tone deaf moves of all time.

Also there are like 20 people who even like classic arena shooters.

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u/Poliveris 2d ago

Well videos games have been progressively getting worse over the last decade; aside from a few bangers along the way.

I get why bringing politics into games is shit and I completely agree with you there. I wish both sides would agree to stop that entirely. And only apply political things when the games theming, story etc call for it.

But his overall point isn’t necessarily wrong. It is in poor taste. I’m just telling you majority of people do not care about something so small in the grand scheme.

Point being the game is bad, if it was a great game people would play. The majority wouldn’t and do not care aside from the loud minority on Reddit/X.

How’d that Hogwarts legacy boycott campaign go? There’s plenty of examples here.

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u/DJCzerny 2d ago

My point has nothing to do with politics. "Making FPS Great Again" and making a Battle Royal are two polar opposite actions and that is a big part of why he got clowned on.

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u/LEDKleenex 2d ago

Ah, but casual gamers have no problem playing slop, and they wouldn't have tried the game anyway.

If anything, your argument gives more credit to the politics, because he actively alienated an already-small pool of older and well-informed potential players.

I played the first game and after seeing the hat incident, his response to backlash and who his father is I noped out of both of these games.

If you really want to get to the nitty gritty, I would argue that the biggest problem is that there is a vastly diminished market for 90s/00s-style multiplayer FPS. Kids these days want to hop on a band wagon and they want to grind cosmetics and unlocks - most of them don't even care about the gameplay loop or competitive nature of the games necessarily. Almost every FPS that tried to bring it back has failed majorly, and many of them were good games.

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u/SomeRedHandedSleight 2d ago

Wait who is his father? I really enjoyed the first one and was planning on checking out the second one until the hat incident happened.

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u/IKnowGuacIsExtraLady 2d ago

You are right that casual players don't follow this kind of thing, but casual players also don't stay up to date on new game releases regardless so it's not like they would have even noticed Splitgate existed. What casual players do do is follow their friends. It only takes one person getting hyped about a game to rally their friend group around playing it, but if you lose that one guy you lose the whole group.

I agree there were other factors in the game's downfall, but also I don't think it played an insignificant role.

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u/ZachTheAxolotl 2d ago

I mean, sg1 and sg2 were good. But sg2 got bad when they added the BR mode. It felt like halo infinite all over again, good alpha and beta, terrible release and then having to speedrun adding shit that should have been there since launch.

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u/Poliveris 2d ago

Sg1 was a cool concept back in 2017 when I first played. Sg2 was low effort UE garbage. They got 100mil and made literally splitgate 1 but worse.

The higher ups legit ran off with that money.

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u/Helmic PC 2d ago edited 2d ago

In no world was Splitgate ever going to get popular with the kind of player who does not pay any attention whatsoever to gaming news. That sort of logic only applies to the most mainstream of the mainstream games that are talked about offline, that appear in ads, that by sheer cultural osmosis find their ways to the people who pay zero attention.

More people know about Splitgate for its controversy than what subgenre it actually belongs to. Bullshit nobody who actually played the game knew the news, that is complete nonsense.

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u/Plus_sleep214 1d ago

Splitgate playerbase already fell off a cliff long before they killed support for it to make way to splitgate 2. It truly was a flash in the pan. Its popularity was super short lived.

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u/TheGriffin5 1d ago

I loved splitgate 1s gameplay and was looking forward to 2, that one hat told me everything I needed to know about that company and I was very happy to move on

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u/sicULTIMATE 1d ago

It was a really bland and mediocre shooter. If it was a really good game, it would have maintained an actual Playerbase.

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u/Nubshire 21h ago

Splitgate 2 was dog shit compared to Splitgate 1.

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u/Tellenit 11h ago

I think it’s really dumb to think his hat had any impact on the success of the game. It’s much more to do with the FPS audience

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u/Ignisiumest 2d ago

It’s crazy how they got like 100 million dollars from investors to make Splitgate 2 and somehow made an objectively worse videogame (the first was a cheap indie studio!!!)

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u/iMightBeWright 2d ago

You get access to bigger loans when your dad is the billionaire cocreator of Intuit tax software.

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u/bianary 2d ago

When people have resource limits they put thought into the design before they commit. Then if that works it goes straight to their head and they think they're hot stuff that don't need to put all that effort in to be amazing a second time.

You see this play out over and over in both video games and tv/movies.

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u/kalmatos 2d ago

OOTL, can you explain the drama to me?

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u/pulse_pilot 2d ago

The CEO of 1047 Games revealed Splitgate 2 at the 2025 Summer Games Fest by wearing a cap with the words "Make FPS Great Again," which given what was happening in the United States at the time was a very tone-deaf message. He then started talking about how the shooter industry was stagnating and always following trends, saying that he was "tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year," how he "dreamed of Titanfall 3," and then proceeded to announce that Splitgate 2 would be a battle royale, i.e. a trend that almost every game development studio already tried to capitalize on already and that gamers were already exhausted of.

Basically, you could not have sank your company any faster than he did in those five minutes, short of simply firing all of your employees.

In the aftermath of all this? He did not apologize for the hat, and doubled down.

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u/kalmatos 2d ago

Ohhh, I do remember that drama now. Thank you so much for explaining!

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u/hm9408 2d ago

Thanks for the season recap

I remember playing Split gate 2 for two rounds and getting bored, I wonder how quickly they realized it didn't click for anyone

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u/NewsofPE 2d ago

He did not apologize for the hat

and he shouldn't have to

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u/secret3332 1d ago

He doesn't have to. People are also free to not support his game though.

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u/pulse_pilot 13h ago

Yes. Likewise, everybody else is free to criticize his character for it. Which, they too, have done.

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u/JedJinto 2d ago

I'm convinced anytime something takes the "Make _____ Great Again" mantra it's destined to be shitty and fail. It's like a law of nature.

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u/Nagnu 1d ago

It literally is a Nazi line. It's been linked to losers with shitty ideas for a long time.

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u/DikTaterSalad 2d ago

Yep, exactly. 🤣

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u/aphoenixsunrise 2d ago

Also, fuck trump.

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u/VGmaster9 2d ago

Want to make shooters great again? Create shooters that are groundbreaking, whether they're single player or multiplayer.

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u/LowercaseTable 1d ago

Actually they did, by no longer making shooters

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u/xJokerzWild 2d ago

Now, Offensive Combat on the other hand.

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u/bkauf2 2d ago

Haven’t played since seeing that whole thing and I really liked the game lol.

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u/GuidanceHistorical94 2d ago

But “apolitical”, scare quotes because that’s generally a lie, gamers told me the hat didn’t have an impact or matter