Splitgate had a bit of a moment earlier this year, as its “Halo meets Portal” concept really took off with players eager to get their hands on Halo Infinite multiplayer. Well, how is Splitgate’s playerbase holding up now that Halo is actually out? While down from the big numbers it was posting this summer, Splitgate has held fairly steady on PC, and according to 1047 Games’ Ian Proulx the game’s PlayStation playercount has “gone up” since Halo Infinite’s release, as PS fans search for their own arena shooter fun…
I’m actually glad [Halo Infinite] is out. I honestly think that, in the long run, Halo Infinite and Splitgate will help each other. I think that there’s just so much noise and so many battle royales right now, and [these two games] are bringing people over to the arena shooter genre. You know, there’s a lot of kids who have never played Halo, right? There’s a lot of kids who have never played Quake or Unreal Tournament. They’ve just never played this kind of game. And getting them exposure to that I think is just a good thing for the genre as a whole.
Ultimately though, while Splitgate has benefitted from its similarity to Halo, 1047 Games still wants to carve out a more unique visual identity for the game.
One of the things we really want to do is establish our own art style. I think that Splitgate’s art style is very much ‘Halo meets Portal’, and the brand is very much that too. I think for a small indie game with no marketing budget, that was incredibly effective – it was just a very succinct way to get people interested, but that’s not what we want to be. We want to establish something where you look at it, and you know it’s Splitgate and not just a pretty well-executed Halo-style game.
Splitgate is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, and playable via backward compatibility on Xbox Series X/S and PS5 (full next-gen console updates are coming sometime this year).
