The Xbox classic “Halo” meets the Valve puzzle-platform game “Portal” in this in-credible, fast-paced, free-to-play, first-person shooter game “Splitgate” that has just recently developed a real fanbase. It has the loveable mechanics and weapon physics that hundreds of thousands of players grew up using in Halo. It also has an improved, cleaner version of the mind-boggling portal mechanics seen in the Portal game. Splitgate is like your stan-dard-FPS, with tons of unique game modes, but also gives you the ability to “hover” and shoot portals across the map to travel quickly and sneak up on enemies.

   According to the Linkedin job listing 1047 Games (the creators) put out for developers, the game officially released in August and shot up to the top of the trending page on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam. After 6 days, they surpassed 1 million downloads, then hit 2 million after 2 weeks, today they have 14 million downloads and counting. Before the burst of popularity (Which many believe started from a viral TikTok with gameplay) 1047 Games only had a staff of 4 people. After the game hit about 600k players, they needed to put on server caps be-cause they didn’t have the resources to handle that many people, that is, until they got their first million dollars of funding. As they hired more staff and expanded the maximum player count, the game grew to the 14 million down-loads they have now and they recently received $100 million dollars more to their funding and are set up to evolve the game to something even bigger. 1047 Games claims they are only about 25% done working on this game to its full, complete potential.

   Many people in the gaming community are calling Splitgate a “dead game.” This usually means a game has fell off and is no longer popular, like Fortnite for example. When you look up the Google Trends, you can see the searches for Splitgate has peaked and is coming back down. Interestingly enough, if you look at the beginning of Fortnite’s growth, they also peaked and then dropped back down to 1% of their peak for about 2 months. It’s very possible Splitgate follows the same pattern and with the plans and funding they have. Based on the pop-ularity, time and growth of Fortnite, I predict we see a new resurgence of Splitgate within the next couple months.