The game was developed by
Nevada-based 1047 Games. Its founders, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian started working on the game as a school project while they were attending
Stanford University studying computer science. Proulx was inspired by
Portal and
Portal 2, and believed that its mechanic could translate well into other video game genres. They worked on the game without funding for six months, and then released a demo for user testing, which became unexpectedly popular as the game drew 600,000 downloads in its first month of release. The game design philosophy was described to be similar to that of
Fortnite and
Rocket League, in which the game is "easy to learn" but "difficult to master". The game was released as a
free-to-play title on
Steam on May 24, 2019. 1047 Games continued to work on the game post-release and had raised a total of $10 million for the project by May 2021 from investors. In June 2021, the company announced that the game would be coming to
PlayStation 4,
PlayStation 5,
Xbox One, and
Xbox Series X/S with
cross-platform play supported. While
Splitgate struggled to maintain a viable player base after its initial early access launch in 2019, the game saw a significant surge of players when the game's beta launched in early July 2021, causing it to surpass 600,000 downloads in the first week. Its sudden popularity was unexpected by the developers and led to the game going offline several times to fix server issues. Despite attempts at increasing server capacity, a queue system was implemented to limit the number of players logging onto the game. Developers posted updates on the server's status on their Twitter accounts until the system was removed in August 2021. On July 22, 2025, the official Splitgate
X account has announced that they will be shutting down Splitgate's dedicated servers, so they can continue supporting
Splitgate 2.
Seasons == Reception ==