What happened after Splitgate 2 unlaunched — and what happens next

“It's been ups and downs,” Proulx told Polygon five months later. “And I think the good news is we're on the up and up right now.”

Proulx has a reason to be optimistic, even if he’s climbing back from a disaster of his own making. Today, Splitgate 2 is officially relaunching as Splitgate: Arena Reloaded. The do-over hopes to return the shooter to its roots, scaling back some of the sequel’s twists and focusing on the core arena shooting that made Splitgate a breakout hit. The battle royale mode is on ice for now. Factions are gone altogether. It’s just some good old-fashioned first-person portal shooting.

Ahead of today’s relaunch, Polygon spoke to Ian Proulx and design director Josh Watson (who previously served as game director on Rocket League) over Zoom about Splitgate’s very weird year. Can the shooter get a second chance after an infamous launch? Proulx and Watson have hope, but it’s all going to come down to how much trust fans have left in 1047 Games after years of unusual decision-making.

For as long as Splitgate has existed, it’s been a bit of a strange shooter. The series first hit early access in 2019 as Splitgate: Arena Warfare, but it didn’t make much of a splash at the time. It wouldn’t have a breakthrough moment until it entered beta in 2021 as Splitgate. It transformed into a multiplayer sensation at that time, prompting 1047 Games to scale up its operation and rework the game’s visual presentation from the inside out. A few updates later, the studio announced that it would stop supporting the game with new updates and instead put its focus on a full sequel.

Three years later, the studio reemerged with Splitgate 2. The sequel would shake up the game’s Halo-meets-Portal sales pitch with the addition of character factions (a la Halo Reach) and large-scale modes, including a battle royale. While the sequel’s surprise launch in June hit a snag right out the gate due to Proulx’s tone-deaf announcement at Summer Game Fest, his hat wasn’t the main problem. Fans simply weren’t clicking with Splitgate 2’s new features, which took emphasis off the core portal-shooting hook. They weren’t alone; the game’s own developers weren’t happy either.

“We put out a lot of surveys with our community. We also do them with our company sometimes,” Proulx said. “We asked the company: Do you think we should remove factions? Would you enjoy the game more? And I think it was like 75% of our company was like, yeah, we'd rather not have factions in the game. That was pretty consistent with the community.”

“I came in after the game went into beta,” Watson added. “Even before I joined the team, I got to experience the game as a fan of Splitgate and a fan of arena shooters. I got to see that from the outside looking in. A lot of the things that players were experiencing were my first impressions as well. A lot of that is around the core expectation of what arena combat should feel like. And that comes down to the modes that we had chosen, the time to kill, just the core gameplay around things like factions and abilities.”

It was clear that Splitgate 2 needed a rethink, but trying to iterate on a live-service game in real time would be like doing heart surgery on a conscious patient. Proulx decided to “unlaunch” Splitgate 2, leaving it online but kicking all live-service plans down the road until the game was back in a new form. The decision came with layoffs at 1047 Games too, which had already let go of a small batch of developers prior to launch. The move received its fair share of ridicule, especially as Proulx’s Summer Game Fest antics turned him into an easy punchline. The idea of an unlaunch was certainly troubling, but the game’s community was more receptive to it than you might imagine.

“It was obviously mixed,” Proulx said. “I think it technically has been done before, but not many times. We were certainly met with skepticism, but I do think there were a number of players who said this is the right decision. This game should be a beta, and they launched too soon, and there's a lot of strong pieces to this game, but there's also missing pieces and unfinished pieces. Looking back, that is where we were at. The players were right about that. So even though it's unconventional, it just sort of felt like the right move given where we were at.”

Even if the community agreed that it was the right move, that didn’t necessarily mean that 1047 Games would be able to win them back easily. The studio had already used up some goodwill with Splitgate, so it would need to work hard to fix the shooter in a satisfactory manner.

“Step one was going through and identifying the problems,” Proulx said. “We came up with eight things we wanted to improve at a high level based on community feedback, based on our own intuition, based on things we were seeing in the data. Just sort of every problem with this game: Where is it falling short? And then let's put pen to paper. We did it as a company. We had the entire company brainstorm on these problems. What are the things you want to see that you think would address these problems?”

Those discussions resulted in some major changes in Splitgate: Arena Reloaded. The most significant difference is that character factions have been cut from the game entirely, despite being the central selling point of the sequel originally. The game’s 60-player battle royale mode is gone, as is the 24-player Onslaught mode. Both will return to Arena Reloaded down the line, according to Proulx, but Watson said that the team’s focus is on “what players have told us is the core experience and making sure we get that right.”

Even with familiar features like the map creator returning in Arena Reloaded at launch, the team began to feel like they were putting out an entirely new game. Community members who were clued into the relaunch told 1047 Games that it didn’t quite feel like Splitgate 3, but it clearly wasn’t the same game that launched in June either. That’s what prompted a total name change, something the first Splitgate game also got during its lifespan.

“Is this really Splitgate 2 still at that point?” Proulx wondered. “For us, changing the name is reflective of, yeah, this is a totally different experience, but we’re not going to call it Splitgate 3. We just want to emphasize this is different. We think it's a lot better, but also we wanted to emphasize that Arena is our top priority. Being explicit about that with the name of the game symbolizes where our heads are at.”

As helpful as a name change can be for rebranding a troubled product, it’s only a small band-aid on a bigger reputation wound. Once you’ve been deemed a disaster by players, it can be hard to change the narrative. Games like Warner Bros.’ Multiversus have learned that lesson the hard way, as the fighting game failed to win back players after going offline and relaunching in retooled form. Arena Reloaded could suffer that same fate, especially since its problems are still very fresh in players’ rear-view mirrors. But comeback stories are possible, and Watson is very aware of that.

“We see the incredible work that teams like Hello Games have done with their community, or you look at things like Warframe and how they have managed to create this incredible community around them,” Watson said. “These are inspirational teams, no doubt about it. The thing that all of those teams have in common is just a complete dedication to their players and meeting their players' expectations. The path forward is always going to be really clear to us. It's like it's always going to be rooted in that.”

Watson is especially tuned in to the evolving optics around live service games. He worked with Psyonix for nearly a decade, watching the studio’s hit Rocket League take several forms in its heyday. Watson says that there’s a lot of “shared DNA” between 1047 Games and Psyonix when it comes to the ways that the studios work, and that has helped him naturally apply some lessons to a new team.

“One of the things that has helped me in my experience coming to the team is that Rocket League is such a monster machine,” Watson said. “There's a lot of processes and hard-won lessons that we've had over the years that you get to bring into a team and hopefully get to give them that knowledge without us having to hit those problems ourselves … Let's look at the package of Splitgate 2 and try to strip that back to what we think is core. We used to do that quite a lot in Rocket League. What is Rocket League? That started to expand over time, and I think this game is a perfect example of that. At its core, what makes Splitgate and how do we hone in and make that the best version of itself?”

The aspirations are there, but Arena Reloaded’s success will lie squarely on whether 1047 Games can rebuild trust with its community. Proulx and Watson both say that they are committed to that, reading every single comment they can find across Discord, Reddit, and social media platforms — even when it means weathering their harshest critics.

“I don't think you can keep your head down,” Proulx said. “You just have to learn to suck it up and go onto the internet and listen to your players. Even if they're telling you things that you don't want to hear, you have to listen. You just have to win trust over time. If you make a great game and you listen to your community, I like to think that that works … We're optimistic that players will recognize the hard work that the team has put into this and that we've had those difficult conversations. We've listened to our community, and we're going to continue to do that.”

We’ll soon find out if the work 1047 Games has done behind the scenes over the past few months is enough. After all, Splitgate: Arena Reloaded is launching in a far more crowded shooter market than Splitgate 2 did in June. It’s now competing with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Battlefield 6, and multiplayer phenomenon Arc Raiders. (The newly announced Highguard is right around the corner in January, too.) There’s a real possibility that 1047 Games has burned the last of its goodwill by now and that Arena Reloaded will be pronounced dead on arrival. No matter which way it goes, you can be sure of one thing: Splitgate 3 isn’t happening anytime soon.

“Every time you put out an update or a launch, you learn something. And we've learned a ton,” Proulx said. “I certainly feel more prepared if I were to launch a Splitgate 3, but hopefully I never need to launch a Splitgate 3, and this will be the last one for years to come.”