Last week, while the XboxEra team attended Gamescom, I got the chance to sit down and chat with Ian Proulx, CEO and Co-Founder of 1047 Games, creators of the very successful Splitgate and the upcoming Splitgate 2.
Obviously, they’ve recently launched Splitgate 2‘s alpha, which I’ve played and quite enjoyed! As an aging Halo fan, Splitgate 2 scratches several itches for me, so being able to chat to Ian was something I was really looking forward to. I was joined by another journalist during this session, and I’ve added her questions here so you can enjoy the complete conversation.
It ranges from discussions about Halo, level design (One of the level designers for Splitgate 2 is a good friend and we’ve worked together on most of the maps I’ve made for Halo Infinite), Splitgate’s place in this world full of live service games, and quite why they hit the brakes on the original Splitgate in the first place.
Enjoy!
Jon: Ian, thanks for agreeing to this – really appreciate you taking the time out. I played the Alpha before I came out to Gamescom. I didn’t play the first game and I was surprised at how easy I took to it. I’ve got a couple of mates here with us, we all grew up on Halo…
Ian: What’s your favorite Halo?
Jon: Multiplayer-wise? (Halo) three, and it’s because it was the right time for me. I was young enough, I worked night shifts, so had no responsibilities and just played for hours. I have an entire friendship group that I met 20 years ago playing that game, and we’re still friends to this day.
Ian: That’s amazing. My favorite was (Halo) two.
Jon: Speaking of “two” – Let’s talk about Splitgate 2. I have to say I was really, really enjoying it. As soon as I reconfigured my controls to work with my aging muscle memory Halo brain, we were destroying people. Friends that played it yesterday on the show floor were equally, “This is great. It feels really, really slick.” I felt that there’s a bit of a more of an eSports focus than perhaps I was expecting. Is that just because that’s the focus for the Alpha to get people streaming?
Ian: I think there’s two things I think that might’ve been a miss on our part, to be honest, that’s not the focus of the game. Obviously, it is a PVP skill-based shooter. There is going to be, not necessarily, but I do think this game will lend itself very well to eSports. Just given the nature of it. Fun first though – that is the top priority.
We want to make a fun game and then let eSports follow very naturally if it does. I think part of the reason that maybe in hindsight it has come across that way is for two things. One is I do think part of our branding is ‘sport of the future’. It’s not meant to be eSport of the future. It’s meant to, like, if we look at-
Jon: Branding wise, it feels like Halo meets The Finals a little bit, to me.
Ian: That’s a fair comparison. I’d say the inspiration for Splitgate 2 was Formula 1, the NBA, NFL. I do get that it ends up conveying ‘competitive eSport’ when really it’s like, “No, we’re trying to carve our own identity. If Halo is fighting to save humanity from the brink of extinction, Splitgate 2 is not. It’s more “Hey, life is good in the future.” It’s the opposite of that.
Jon: We can have fun.
Ian: Right. We’re having fun and instead of arguing over politics or war or whatever, we’re arguing over which athlete is the best. Is it LeBron or is it Kobe, right?
That’s the extent of the drama in this world. I think that’s part of it. I think the other thing is with what we’ve shown so far we’re showing Hot Zone and TDM. That was really just because that’s what we wanted feedback on. We wanted to test our controversial changes early. I don’t need feedback on a fun party mode or at least not this early because those are not as important to balance. I think for us this was more about we’re going to start with a very small sample of what’s going to be a part of Splitgate 2. We’ve got a lot more. We are scratching at the surface here.
Let’s start with these two things. Let’s learn what we can – is Hot Zone a competitive mode? Yes, it is, but like, is that all we have? No. I should add, we literally just announced yesterday, I don’t know if you even noticed, but there’s the shared capture progression…we ended up reversing that already.
Jon: You immediately reacted and changed how that works.
Ian: Yes, just an immediate change, because our thought was like, “We’ve tested this a lot internally and there’s a lot of things we like about it, it leads to a lot of epic moments.” We knew going into Alpha, like, “This is probably a controversial change, but let’s just get it out there and get feedback early.” Because if I get feedback on the things that everyone already likes that I know they’re going to like, what’s the point? Versus, this is what an Alpha is for, this test our changes, see what people think, see how they react. Some people really liked it, but we heard from the fans, a lot of them just want, “Hey, we like this mode in general, but we don’t want this shared progression, it feels too unfair.” We said, “We hear you. We’re changing it.”
Jon: How do you balance listening to feedback in general? I often find that if people love something, they might be non-communicative-
Ian: I know.
Jon: – and then you get the really loud minority. How do you balance listening to that and making the game you want to make, and resist listening to the many armchair developers there are out there that’s like, “Why don’t you just do this?” How do you balance that?
Ian: It is super difficult. I think what I’ve learned is you have to take everything into account but ultimately trust your gut. When I say take everything into account, we’re looking at data of what’s popular, what’s performing well, what’s causing people to quit. We’re listening to the community. Some of that is on Discord. Some of it’s hearing the loud vocal minority on Twitter, but it’s looking at everything.
Some of it is we have tools that summarizes all of this stuff, measures sentiment, et cetera, but I think ultimately you go with your gut because you’re never going to be right 100% of the time. There’s going to be times where the vocal loud ones are right. To your point, there’s going to be times where, “Hey,” all the people who are not on Twitter, the 90%-
Jon: Might be very happy?
Ian: -they’re very happy and they’re busy playing the game, and it’s that 10% that are angry that have gone to Twitter. It’s a very difficult balance that you just strive to do the best you can. With game development, you’re always iterating.
You’re iterating on your process and how you respond, you’re iterating on the game and you just do the best you can, and you try to be transparent about it.
Jon: Yes, I think the relationship between game developers has changed, we’ve seen it over the years with the rise of early access and direct communication. Is there an early access period for Splitgate 2 that you guys are generally considering? You’ve got your Alpha live right now, is there a plan to then, “Here’s early access, everyone can play, you don’t have to register, you can just dive in and then we’re going to unpeel more.”
Ian: We’re still figuring that out. I think though the natural progression at a high level is like, “We’re going to show more over time.” Start small, show a little bit, get a little bit bigger, get a little bit bigger, and then go big at launch. That’s all still being figured out.
Jon: When we say go big… at the moment Splitgate 2 feels very cool and competitive focused, is there plans for Splitgate to go big literally, like your take on Big Team Battle? Are there ideas in mind for things like that from a high level? Obviously, that’s a whole different kettle of fish, right? You can’t shove 16 players or more into the level designs you’ve currently got!
Ian: (Laughs) Definitely not. We’re not really talking about future game modes yet, but I will say, one of our goals with Splitgate 2 was ‘meaningful variety with a purpose’. I think what we saw in Splitgate for a variety of reasons was, everything felt the same, so that was partly just the nature of everyone’s load-up always being exactly the same, but if you look at the game modes, we had a lot of modes that all felt the same.
Jon: The original Splitgate’s modes blended together a little bit.
Ian: Yes, it was all different flavors and the same thing. This time around we’re definitely making modes that are not different flavors of the same thing. We’re going for much more variety. Every mode should offer a unique experience and not just be a slightly different variance on what’s already there.
Jon: When I look at the original Splitgate, it had this meteoric rise. I’ve always been curious about this – you had this meteoric rise, and then you kind of just hit pause and you guys were like, “Hang on.” Then you’ve regrouped and now we’re here with Splitgate 2. What was some of the decisions behind hitting the brakes and then restarting things? Was it just like, “That was a really good first try, but we think we can do better?”
Ian: I think we look at Splitgate as a stepping stone and a massively successful stepping stone.
We were a very small team at the time. You got to keep in mind Splitgate started off as a school project. We literally named the company 1047 Games after our dorm room at Stanford, 1047. When we launched it, actually, we did a soft launch in 2019. Iterated, listened to the community, et cetera, for two years. Then in 2021, we felt like, all right, the game is now actually really good. We’ve had two years to improve this thing based on feedback. Now it’s time to go big. 2021 is when we came to Xbox and PlayStation relaunched.
Jon: And it really took off!
Ian: Right, that’s when things took off. There were two things in our way. One, is we didn’t have the servers/backend/infrastructure. Two, is we just didn’t have the team or resources. We were a team of under 20 people.
Jon: For modern live service player demands?
Ian: Exactly, and that’s super important. We had our moment because everybody showed up and they had a ton of fun. Then it’s like, “All right. Now what? Where’s the update? Where’s the new thing?”
Jon: Then you have to deal with that. From your perspective, as a small team, you hadn’t planned for that success so you didn’t have an answer ready to go.
Ian: We were expecting slow and steady growth where we build the team out, et cetera. You started by asking about the decision to go to Splitgate 2. This was actually a conversation Nick and I had, my co-founder Nick. It was a conversation we had very shortly after the relaunch and after getting funding. We looked at each other and we’re like “We’ve got all this money now, all this brand recognition – and this is great, but think about all the things we could do if we could start over. If we could take the time to do it the right way and not just build on a school project that’s super fun. Still, there’s a lot of technical decisions we made early on. There’s a lot of design decisions we made early on that we’d really like to redo because now we know what we’re doing. Similarly, there’s just things we just got better at. We talk about level design, the first maps in Splitgate were made by me prior-
Jon: They were good!
Ian: -prior to Blaze joining. They weren’t ‘Blaze’ maps.
Jon: (Laughs) We have to face it, he’s better at it than us.
Ian: Blaze’s maps were a lot better. I think with Splitgate 2, there were a lot of things like that where it’s like we’d really like to throw this thing away and make more of that thing. With Splitgate 2, our thought was, “Let’s take our time. Let’s build this with live service in mind. Let’s get all the tech debt solved. Let’s hit that AAA bar and let’s take our time to build a stacked team. The other thing is we were feeling the pressure of this game is now live, we got to go hire, hire, hire, hire, hire people and that’s a recipe for disaster.
Jon: You don’t know what you’re getting. You end up rushing through it.
Ian: Right, and you don’t want to rush that. Our thought is like if we shift focus to Splitgate 2, it gives us the time to make the right hires, build the right team.
Jon: It’s a remarkably sensible decision!
Jon: I don’t think you guys hide the fact that you were big Halo 2 arena fans, and Splitgate 2 feels like an arena shooter in 2024. Is there any concern from a ‘live service’ point of view that this hardcore minority that’s screamed for arena shooters and that they’re not dead; is there any fear that they are just loud?
I look at the team that made Concord, they’ve made a great looking game but I’m very concerned for them at launch, right? Because you are fighting against people still playing on Fortnite and all of these live service games. How do you think about that from an industry perspective when you look at the future launch of Splitgate 2?
Ian: Complicated question. I hate defining games in these buckets, like is this an arena shooter, is this a tactical shooter, because to me it’s like it’s obviously an FPS, there are arena shooter elements, there are tactical shooter elements, there are unique elements. I think, trying to put it in a bucket, is it an arena shooter, is it an arcade shooter? Some purists will tell you no, that’s not an arena shooter, an arena shooter everyone has to be exactly the same and it has to be pickups everywhere and tactical shooters will tell you, oh, it has to be no respawns and so on.
I think we have a really nice middle ground with the increasing respond timer where you have that arena shooter fill up a start of a round and then you have that tactical shooter feel at the end of a round where the stakes are starting to get higher, kills are starting to matter a little bit more, deaths are a little more punishing. I think we have this really nice middle ground and obviously we’re round based for at least what we’ve shown so far. I don’t like to get into, ‘bucketizing’ things.
I think for me looking at the competition and you mentioned Concord and a bunch of other games. I think if I look at FPS games, step one is you have to stand out and I’m not going to bash any other games but I do think some games stand out more than others, and I think this definitely is a very unique experience especially with the portals, that’s still our unique selling point. This is something that doesn’t really exist. I think that’s step one. Then step two is how do you make sure that when you have your moments, you’re able to sustain it. That’s a big, big, big challenge-
Jon: Huge!
Ian: -right? I think what we’ve seen with a lot of the shooters that have come out in recent years is everybody’s still playing the same things, is the ones that are good have their moments but they haven’t been able to sustain it. The Finals, I think it’s a great game but you look at the player count – it still has a healthy player base – but it had a massive launch and it’s come down. I think it’s a great game but I think games like that haven’t had the learning lessons that we have had the Splitgate 1, because we had our moments and then we saw the players come down.
That’s pretty natural for any Free-to-play game to some degree, but if there’s one thing we’ve been obsessing about for the last few years, it’s how do we make sure that doesn’t happen again? How do we make sure that when we have our moment, we have an awesome live ops and content plan to support it, to grow it? People underestimate just how important and how much work there is to that and we have not underestimated that. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, why are we doing all this stuff? It’s like guys, it has to be an amazing – you can’t just have an amazing game and assume, we’ll figure out all that other stuff.
Jon: Yes. You see it happen all the time, like a game will have a great launch and then everyone’s like, “We’re done with the content! Oh, the next season is four months away?” Then by that time you’ve lost them. They’re all gone.
Antonia: Do you think it’s actually more about the marketing side than about the game to sustain its growth?
Ian: No. I think it’s more about– I think both matter, right? I think marketing is important at having the launch. Most of our marketing is around launch, right? Right now we’re doing a closed Alpha. The closed Alpha for us is about being an Alpha and getting feedback. I think for a lot of games they use these Alphas as hype driven marketing things.
Jon: It’s a beta in reality?
Ian: Right. For us it’s no. We’re launching in 2025. Right now our goal is get feedback, but I think marketing gets you your moments if you have a good game, and then I think content which hopefully marketing is doing a good job of showing the world. I think it’s the actual live-ops plan. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what you tell the players. What matters is the players who are playing, what are they telling their friends?
Jon: Yes. The sentiment, certainly among my friendship group, is that Splitgate 2 already feels really solid, especially for people who have fallen off Halo and want something different to try.
Ian: Halo Infinite, again, another great game! But how long did it take them to ship their first season? Where would Halo Infinite be if they launched with a lot of contents and forge and all these things?
Jon: I don’t disagree. (laughs)
Ian: I love Halo, but that stuff is so important. I would never launch without all my ducks in a row.
Jon: You mentioned the portals earlier, that it’s still a unique thing about Splitgate 2. While I was holding my own in straight fights, I was suddenly seeing the meta of the game start to happen – a match would start, and then people would be placing portals and waiting for line of sight because you can’t see through your enemy’s portal, but you can see through your own. I was starting to be like, “Oh, okay. I need to rethink.” Obviously, from a level design perspective, you’ve got the portal walls in very specific places, and it takes into account that classic from-portal, the momentum you fall through and then you launch up.
I was seeing some absolutely insane stuff. This is like two hours into the first Alpha going live. There’s clearly a lot of appetite from lapsed Splitgate players coming in and going, “How can I play with the new tools?” They’re already frighteningly good. From a competitive angle, I see some insane matches going on. How do you plan for that, from a level design perspective, with all of that in play?
Ian: Well, in Splitgate 1, we didn’t!
[laughter]Ian: We didn’t know how people would play the game, so a lot of it was just guessing. I think in Splitgate 2, we’ve learned a ton. ‘Triple portaling’ wasn’t even a thing that we ever thought about. It was just something the community figured out.
Jon: Wow.
Ian: I think in Splitgate 2, we’re really thinking about every angle, every portal wall. Where can I portal from this portal wall? Where can I camp? Where can I flank? Just thinking through all of that, it’s difficult.
Jon: I can imagine.
Ian: I’ve had other level designers. I don’t know if you know Garrett possibly. I know you know Blaze. But Garrett has said it best, which is: “This is the most difficult game I’ve ever made levels for.”
Jon: I think Blaze has said something similar, but he loves doing it. I guess it’s a good challenge, right?
Ian: Yes.
Antonia: What sticks out to me the most in Splitgate 1 was that the matchmaking seemed to be perfect every time, so I was never sweating or finding it too easy, but was every match was really closeregarding which team would win. It was so much fun. I was like, “How did you do that?”
Ian: I don’t know. I guess I’d say in terms of matchmaking, I think it’s a balance. I think there’s two extremes. People are looking at skill-based matchmaking as this binary, where it’s like either you have it super tight and super sweaty or you don’t have it. To me, the obvious answer is somewhere in between where you need some level of loose skill-based matchmaking because you don’t want pro players destroying brand-new players.
Jon: Yes, it pains, it hurts. (laughs)
Ian: That’s not fun for anyone. It’s not fun to go get destroyed. Also, it’s like there’s no challenge at all if I am playing someone who can’t even shoot back. I think the answer is in the middle where you don’t want that, but you also don’t want every single game to be sweaty, 50 to 49, extremely competitive. You want variety. We talked about one of our goals being meaningful variety with a purpose. I think that extends to matchmaking where we want to give you a fast game, we want to give you low pain, and we want to give you variety where some games, you’re the best player, some games, you’re probably the worst player. Somebody’s got to be.
Hopefully, you’re the worst player who’s being pushed but not absolutely annihilated.
Antonia: Was it a simple ELO score that you used if you can talk about that?
Ian: Splitgate 1 was just ELO. We had a starting ELO in the middle, and then based on how if you won or lost and based on your stats, it would go up a little bit, down a little bit.
Jon: As we close this out, I’m conscious of time here – is there anything you’d like to mention that we haven’t discussed already?
Ian: Well, I guess there’s three things I’ll leave you with. One is the closed Alpha is live now through Sunday night. That’s one thing. I think the other two things I’d highlight is just – this is still a game all about guns and portals and movement. We obviously have classes, different ways to play, and different equipment and that’s great. Really, we wanted to make more of a Valorant than an Overwatch. It’s still going to come down to how good is somebody’s aim, how good is the portaling, how good is the teamwork, and then those equipments are going to be that thing – that 10% – that gives you that boost.
I guess last thing is just, we got a lot more to come. This is a very, very small sample. We use these closed Alphas to test specific things, and we have plenty more to come and to test.
Antonia: Do you plan on keeping Splitgate 1 alive and online when Splitgate 2 comes out?
Ian: We haven’t decided exactly yet what the plan is. All we’ve really said publicly is we’re not taking it offline this year. I think we’re still just trying to figure out, how can we support it for how long but haven’t decided yet.
Jon: Lovely stuff – great chatting with you Ian, and many thanks for taking the time with us today. Congrats on the Alpha – looking forward to playing more!
