Portal shooter Splitgate’s servers problems have been solved for now

Shooting with portals

News by Craig Pearson Contributor

Published on Aug. 6, 2021

Splitgate’s twist on the arena shooter, where players can cast portals around the levels and pull off impossible shots, saw a spike in the free FPS’ popularity when it released into beta on consoles (PC has had it since 2019). It was so popular that it basically killed the game for a few weeks because the servers were overwhelmed. With an hour-long queue reported to get into a short game of shoot-the-mans, I haven’t had the chance to try.

Thankfully, that seems to have been fixed with an update yesterday. With new funding, the game’s server capacity and support has been upgraded. The current player count on Steam is about 61,000, and I experienced no queue when I just tried to get in.

I’ve been enjoying watching this all play out via the developer’s Twitter feed. First they explained that they only had slots for 65,536 concurrent players that no amount of optimisation would correct that.

We spent all night optimizing more but after talking to AWS, we learned our database (redis) can only handle 65,536 concurrent players (what we hit last night). So no optimizations matter yet. We are working on a queue system to let 65k ppl in until we remove this limitation. pic.twitter.com/SBDpzk0vTy
— Splitgate (@Splitgate) July 22, 2021

Then we got an announcement of funding that should help with increasing the server capacity, stability, and the support they can provide: "We have acquired $10 million in funding to expand our dev team/increase server capacity!"

And then a success tweet!

Today has been a HUGE success for us!

Our most recent patch has given us hugely increased capacity and stability. Because of this we've seen much shorter queue times while having more demand than ever!

Thank you for your continued patience as we work through these crazy times!
— Splitgate (@Splitgate) August 5, 2021

I was playing on a Friday afternoon at midday UK time, so maybe I managed to get in before all of America woke up and decided to try again, but everything worked well, and there was no lag.

It left me to experience what all the fuss was about, and I have to say I get it. The couple of games I played pulled off the floaty rat-a-tat of Halo alongside Portal's problem solving very smartly. It’s rare for me to immediately click with a shooter, but having spent a lot of time as Symmetra in Overwatch, I know how to teleport around enemy lines. It’s broadly similar, which seemed to give me an advantage right away. In each match I was snapping portals all over the place, testing out tactics, sniping through high-angled portals from a safe corridor, or creating elaborate escape routes. I haven’t yet managed to send an enemy through a portal, but that’s my goal.

I had to stop playing to write this. It’s good, it currently works, and it’s free on Steam right now.