How 1047 Games put its VC money to good use on Splitgate 2 | Ian Proulx interview

Splitgate started as a franchise with an idea that extended a great single-player game into a multiplayer experience. And Splitgate 2 hopes to expand the franchise further.

As hardcore gamers all know, Valve created a cool experience with Portal, where you could slap a cross-dimensional portal on a wall, then shoot at a distance spot to create another portal. Then you could move into the portal and emerge at the other portal. It was an amazing game experience.

But Ian Proulx and his team at 1047 Games came up with the idea that a dimensional portal would be a great basis for a multiplayer game. They executed on that idea where Valve didn’t, and the innovation turned out to have a big payoff. The first Splitgate game got more than 22 million downloads since 2019 on the consoles and the PC.

And now the sequel is expected to come out in 2025. The new title is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter game that pits four human players against four other humans. You choose your faction, customize your weapons and master your portal skills. I played the game recently and found that those who make proper use of the portal tricks are the ones that come up behind you and take you out.

The timing has been good for 1047 Games, as the success enabled 1047 Games to raise $100 million in venture capital funding in 2021– which turned out to be the heyday for game venture capital. And now the company is investing a lot of that money in an expanded team. All told, 1047 Games has more than 175 people. And the game will debut on Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Epic Games Store.

I caught up with Ian Proulx, CEO of 1047 Games, at the recent Gamescom event in Cologne in August.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: I was surprised. I often gauge things by how bad I do or how good I do the first time I play. This one, I did reasonably well. But it was disconcerting in a way. At the very beginning I was getting lots of kills on a winning team. But something happened in the middle. One of your developers joined or something. They just started laying waste to all of us.

Ian Proulx: The streamers probably started coming in. That’s how it goes for me, too. We’ve gone to closed alpha. We’re not letting everybody in, but we’ve let more people in. We’re at about 4,000 concurrent. That’s enough to get a meaningful sample size, but have more of a bell curve of skill. If you have time to check it out in the next few days, I’d definitely encourage you.

GamesBeat: What are some of the major differences from the first game?

Proulx: There are a couple of things that we’ve revealed so far and then a lot more to come. The most obvious thing you’ll see is the overall quality and ;level of detail. Splitgate was a very small team, a very small budget. It started as a school project at Stanford. Splitgate 2, we’re up to 175 people now. We did an interview when we raised the $100 million in funding a couple of years ago. We’ve put that funding to good use. This looks and feels like a triple-A game. We have the audio director from God of War Ragnarok. Our lead weapon artist was the lead weapon artist on Call of Duty. Our animation director was at Ubisoft for many years. We brought in a lot of heavy hitters to make this game look and feel like a triple-A game, like you would see from a Call of Duty or a Halo.

The biggest obvious gameplay differences you’ll notice, it’s a class-based game. There are three factions. Each faction plays a bit differently. They have different weapons, different equipment, different attachments, different perks. You can customize your experience to your play style. This also allows us to have a meta that evolves over time. Those are the immediate things that pop out. Obviously we have a lot more to come. We’re starting with our bread and butter – show the game, give them a demo, give them a small sample of what we have, and show the fans we’ve done right by them.

GamesBeat: How successful was the first game?

Proulx: It was a massive success. We had more than 22 million downloads. For a game that started in a dorm room, not even a 20-person team, that’s every indie game’s dream. For Splitgate 2, if we only end up with 22 million downloads, that would not be a success. Obviously we want a lot more. We want those 22 million fans to enjoy Splitgate 2, but we’re hoping to reach a much larger audience.

GamesBeat: It feels like there should be a genre describing games that do what a big hit game should have done. “Portal could have been multiplayer!” “Pokemon could have had guns!” Coming up with the right twists can pay off.

Proulx: The great thing about the spot we’re in–you see those indie hits that have those ideas. Pokemon with guns, Halo with portals, whatever it is. But what you haven’t seen yet is, what’s the sequel to that? What’s Among Us 2? Where can you take it now that you have more firepower? Indie games are often innovating and taking risks and coming up with new ideas, but we haven’t seen the generation of games that follow up on those hits. Splitgate 2 is hopefully going to be one of the first of many indie hits that take it to the next level.

GamesBeat: What do you think of the market these days? Are you happy about the timing and the environment for Splitgate 2?

Proulx: I’m very optimistic about the market for myself. Not for the world. Obviously it’s been a tough time for the industry. Financially, we’re in good shape, which has been great for hiring. It also means there’s less competition coming out. A lot of people look at the FPS market and decide that it’s too crowded, too competitive. But the way I look at it, we’re playing the same games we were playing two, three, four, five years ago.

What I see from a lot of the recent games that have come out and done well is that gamers are desperate for something new, but most of these games haven’t been able to figure out the really challenging part, which is live ops. With Splitgate 2, we already figured out how to make a fun game that’s different in Splitgate. We had our moment. We weren’t able to sustain it, but we were able to capitalize on it. With Splitgate 2, we think we’ll have a very similar moment, but this time around we’ll be able to sustain it. We have a larger team. We have a content plan, a live ops plan. We’re thinking through just how difficult this problem is to solve. Everyone is waiting for the next big thing. We’re ready to step in and hopefully be that next big thing.

GamesBeat: Does it feel like there’s maybe no need to go back and come up with a big single-player campaign? I remember EA saying that only a third of Battlefield players were completing their very expensive, very time-consuming single-player mode.

Proulx: Campaigns are very expensive. I’ve never built one, but I can imagine how much goes into it. I’m sure this is a conversation a lot of game studios are having. You want to stay focused. You want to do the things you do well and double down on that, rather than trying to make a game for everyone. I love the idea of making a campaign one day, but it’s probably not going to happen any time soon. I want to make sure I deliver the best multiplayer experience ever, because that’s what we’re good at. That’s what we have the budget to do. I’d rather spend resources to make that part of the game as good as possible, versus spreading ourselves thin.

I’m also a huge single-player fan. I play a lot of these campaigns. You never know. Maybe one day we’ll get to do it.

GamesBeat: It seems reassuring that venture-funded companies are starting to prove themselves with very good quality. I saw Mountaintop’s game recently.

Proulx: I know their founder. Nate is a good friend. We compare notes a lot.

GamesBeat: They did a good job with their own unique idea. It seems like one area of difficulty for the whole industry is that some companies managed to raise enough to get to market, and some seem to have raised in tranches. The ones who raised only part of what they needed now find they can’t raise the next round.

Proulx: It’s tough. I empathize with those people. Thankfully we raised a lot. We also made a lot of money. We’re well-capitalized to get to launch, have a great marketing campaign, and keep going. But it’s tough, for sure.

GamesBeat: Do you fit all your people in Tahoe?

Proulx: I wish. We do once a year, though. We do a company off-site every year. It’s in two weeks. We fly the whole company out to Tahoe for a week. It’s a week of fun and outdoorsy stuff and team bonding. It’s awesome. It’s something we do differently from everywhere else.

GamesBeat: What have you learned about remote management?

Proulx: Remote absolutely can work. I don’t think it works for everyone. When I say “everyone,” I mean both individuals and companies. Some companies, it doesn’t make sense. Some individuals don’t do as well in a remote environment. We have two advantages. One, we’ve always been remote. We figured this out. You have to structure things differently than you would in person. We figured it out on a small scale and we were able to grow it. If you start out in person, with an in-person culture, and then all of a sudden you have to pivot, I can understand that being very difficult.

The other huge advantage we have is we’re a video game company. Bonding is very important. Socializing is very important. But the good news about being a video game company is that everyone on our team is a gamer. How do gamers socialize? We play games online. I’m a big believer in playtesting. We play Splitgate 2 twice a week, the whole company. That’s socializing. Part of it is we want to get feedback. We want to test new changes and look for bugs. But part of it is we’re just having a good time and building the connections that you don’t get otherwise.

Being a video game company, you can absolutely do remote. I can understand why it would be challenging for a lot of companies. But you have to do more than that as well. That’s why we do the team off-sites. That’s why we do quarterly team dinners in the various hubs we have. We have people in Germany, the bay area, Seattle, Los Angeles, Montreal. Those hubs do team dinners. We play a lot of games together. We use Discord as well. Discord is kind of our virtual office. You have to go that extra mile to make it work and make it feel real. But it’s absolutely something that can be done and should be done more often.

GamesBeat: What do you notice when people play Splitgate really well? Especially Splitgate 2. How do they make good use of the portals?

Proulx: There’s a lot of triple-portaling. I don’t know if we know the answer yet, though. We’ve had a closed alpha for a day. A lot of the top players right now are the top Splitgate 1 players. They’re using similar strategies to what they did the last time. That’s going to be a big part of Splitgate 2, but I look forward to seeing how it evolves over the months and years to come. With Splitgate 1, the pro scene was very different by the end of the cycle compared to when we first launched. The strategies and skills were very different. I’m sure that’s going to happen here.

GamesBeat: Are you making progress on esports?

Proulx: Not really? Our attitude is fun first. Let’s make a fun game. Of course it’s PvP. It’s definitely a skill-based game. I think it will lend itself well to esports. But right now we’re focused on making a fun game. We’ve had some esports-related companies reach out, and we’ll talk to them. But most of the time our answer is, “We have to get through the launch and make an awesome game first.”

GamesBeat: Has anyone else tried to make a game with this kind of mechanic? The only thing I can think of is Mountaintop’s, where you’re throwing an object and using that to control the two different bodies, but–

Proulx: If you played Prey back in the day, they had stationary portals that you could see through. But really, there’s nothing like Splitgate. Being able to dynamically spawn portals, move through them, shoot through them. Triple portal, momentum portal, portal flank, nothing even scratches that surface.

GamesBeat: What else are you looking to learn from the players right now?

Proulx: We’re only showing two modes and three maps. We’re showing some of the weapons for the factions. A big part is balancing. We want to see what factions people gravitate toward. Map design, we’ve shown the first three maps we ever made for Splitgate 2. A lot of that was inspired by the most popular maps. Doing more of what worked and less of what didn’t work in Splitgate. We’re trying to validate that we’re on the right path there, but we’ll look at the feedback. And then the mode, Hot Zone, that’s one of our competitive modes. Of course we have a lot more modes to come that are both casual and competitive. We wanted to see–in a competitive environment, how does this all fit together? Then we have team deathmatch, of course, because it’s a classic. We’re primarily looking for feedback on that core gameplay.

Disclosure: Devcom paid my way to Cologne, where I moderated two panels.