Splitgate 2’s Ian Proulx Talks The Future of the Franchise, Price Point Survival in a Jam-Packed Market and THAT Sliding Doors Moment at Gamescom (INTERVIEW)

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Splitgate 2’s Ian Proulx Talks The Future of the Franchise, Price Point Survival in a Jam-Packed Market and THAT Sliding Doors Moment at Gamescom (INTERVIEW)

Gamescom 2024 was a busy time, where gamers got first looks at huge games, developers showcased what they had on offer, and thousands of interviews, meetings, and discussions took place that could steer the future of the industry.

1047 Games’ CEO and Co-Founder Ian Proulx was good enough to take some time to talk Splitgate 2 with us, and not only what we have in store when the sequel launches, but how it’s avoided mistakes the first made, surprises from the community and how one big, ballsy moment at Gamescom changed everything.

[Some answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Splitgate 2 is an Evolution, Not Just a Rehash

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When was the decision made to move away from Splitgate and start production on the Splitgate 2?

The actual decision to move from Splitgate to Splitgate 2 was in September of 2022. The first time we really had this thought was actually in more like, I want to say, September or October of 2021. So really quickly after the relaunch of Splitgate coming to console and right after funding, you know.

I don’t know if you know this, but Splitgate was started off in the dorm room. We actually named 1047 Games after our dorm 1047. And so a very small team, a very small budget, and a lot of success, obviously, but we weren’t able to sustain it.

Was it true that it started off as a school project?

So it was… Most school projects were never this… Yeah, started off as my senior project at Stanford. But yeah, so we kind of talked about it once we got the funding after all the success, like, “All right, this is great, but man, wouldn’t it be fun to do it all over again?”.

You know, you think about the lives you’ve impacted like that. And like, this was a **** who was going into some desk job that he wasn’t passionate about, but because of Splitgate’s success, you know, he’s now doing what he loves.

There’s so many things we know and just you know we want to go build a superstar team and we want to go build a triple-a game like there’s a lot of things that we need to do differently. There were a lot of things that we really wanted to do differently that we just couldn’t do back then but with all the resources we have now with the funding, we just thought man “Wouldn’t it be fun to ****** for the stars?”.

A lot of developers regularly say that sequels are a chance to fix the mistakes they made in the past which you kind of just touched upon. What did you do differently for the second from a development process point of view compared to the first?

Let’s think from a process of development, well, I think it’s been a little more organized and efficient. I don’t think there’s been anything drastically different, though. I mean, since day one, our process has been ‘playtest, playtest, playtest’ and ‘iterate, iterate, iterate’.

And so, you know, with Splitgate 1, that started off as me inviting a bunch of my friends to come over once a month to play early builds of it. and in Splitgate 2 that’s been our whole company with 175 people playtesting twice a week, so we really take advantage. I’m a huge believer everyone’s got to be playing the game a lot and so that that process has largely stayed the same.

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What are some plans to make Splitgate 2 a competitive eSport?

Yeah, so we don’t have any specific plans yet. I think obviously, Splitgate is a skill-based game. It’s fun to watch. So I do think it naturally could become an eSport and would be a great eSport, but that’s not the priority. The priority is fun first.

We want to make a fun game, and that’s it. Long term, I think there’s a good chance it turns into something more than that, but right now, we’re just focused on let’s make a fun game that people love.

The other thing I’ll add to that, but obviously this alpha is more of a demo. We’re calling it internally ‘Gamescom at Home’. It’s a very, very small sample of what’s to come. We’re really looking for feedback, so we’ve only got two modes right now, Hot Zone and TDM.

Obviously, TDM because everyone loves TDM. Hot Zone, though, is one of our core competitive modes and that’s what we’re looking for feedback on. That’s, you know, those things take a lot more time to get balanced and get them right and so lots more to come but, you know, we wanted to keep it focused to start.

What are your future goals for the game post-launch? What do you want Splitgate 2 to represent and to become for us, the players?

I think my goals post-launch, I mean, obviously a fun game, but I think it’s more that I want to make a game that the Splitgate fans love, but also that players who never played Splitgate are able to experience and enjoy as well. And also it has longevity, right?

I think that’s one of the hardest things in games today or at least live service games is making a game that’s sustainable, that’s not just fun for a month but fun for years so you know that’s that’s my goal is that we can make something that is fresh and keeps people playing for years to come.

Splitgate 2 Won’t Rely on Familiarity to Succeed

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Splitgate 2 is visually very different from the first, what prompted this?

I don’t know if that stemmed from any learnings. I mean, maybe, I guess I’ll say one thing was, you know, Splitgate, we were a very small team. We didn’t really have the budget to build our own identity. We didn’t have a marketing budget to get the word out there. So our marketing was Halo meets Portal, right? Like that was a very easy comparison to make that kind of immediately told people what we were doing. And so we kind of owned up and leaned into that.

I think with Splitgate 2, that was very limiting and we want to build and carve out our own identity. And so a lot of, and quite frankly, we just, we have the resources to do it now. And so my vision for Splitgate 2 has always been that Splitgate is a sport, not a war and that it’s a positive future. And so if you compare this to kind of a darker, more Halo-esque art style, you know, in Halo you’re fighting to save humanity, right?

We’re the opposite of that. Like in the world of Splitgate in my vision, I’m an optimist so I look at the world and I think 200 years from now life’s gonna be pretty good and we’re not gonna be on the brink of extinction. I think we’re actually gonna be thriving and so the the only conflict 200 years from now is gonna be who’s the best competitor right? Who’s the best player? Who’s the best ace? Is it Kobe or is it LeBron or is it Michael Jordan and less you know, going to war to save humanity.

What other modes are you potentially thinking about bringing into the game in the future?

So we’re not really talking about specifics yet, but what I will say is we’re definitely going to have a great mix of casual and competitive. You know, Splitgate, if you look at it, Splitgate’s modes were kind of all different flavors of the same thing. There was still some goofiness, of course, and we’ll have all sorts of fun stuff, but I will say one of our goals with Splitgate 2 is we wanted meaningful variety with a purpose.

And so we don’t want to just have twenty modes that are all sort of the same thing, we really want to focus on ‘Let’s have distinct modes that offer unique and varied experiences’.

How are you managing to not only improve the sequel but also change the experience for Splitgate 2 so it’s its own thing, whilst managing to not alienate the devout fan base and making it both accessible to new players?

It’s a super delicate balance. I think you know the whole journey of starting with Splitgate 2 was looking at what are the things people love about Splitgate and what are the things where we fell short. So I think the biggest things that people love are the gunplay, portals, and just the overall fun vibe and the fact that we don’t really take ourselves too seriously.

Those are the three things we really wanted to preserve with Splitgate 2 let’s make sure that we have that classic awesome gunplay and even build on top of it. Let’s make sure that we have the best portal mechanic ever and improve the usability make it just as easy to portal and pull off ***** plays as ever and then let’s make it fun.

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I think addressing the weaknesses and kind of the shortcomings, you know, I talked about variety. I’d say art style and lore are a big thing that you can tell from just what we’ve shown so far. Got a lot more to come. I’ll say some of our goals were, you know, having better and more meaningful progression, having amazing live ops.

That’s one thing I think we’re gonna do a lot better with Splitgate 2, it is our live ops plan and our content plan. Not sharing specifics on that today, but that was definitely a shortcoming in the first game that we majorly, majorly addressed this time around.

What’s something cool or unexpected about either the sequel or the original that got you excited?

Well, so I’ll answer this in two ways. So I’d say on Splitgate 1, I don’t know if you’re familiar with triple portaling, when people kind of step through a portal a few inches, move the portal, step back, go through the portal, portal, portal, portal.

That was unexpected, right? We never built Splitgate thinking this is how people are going to play the game. We just kind of made maps and put a bunch of random portal walls, and some of it worked and some of it didn’t. We definitely didn’t design with triple portaling in mind, and we have this time around, so that definitely impacted Splitgate 2.

I think that’s one of the hardest things in games today or at least live service games is making a game that’s sustainable.

There are a lot of cool triple portal routes, but then also, you know, correcting the mistakes, right? Some of the issues of Splitgate 1 were you’d have maps like Oasis or Pantheon where you’d have portals way up high that could see the entire map and people would just camp there forever, and so we wanted to kind of embrace what makes Splitgate ***** and awesome which is triple portaling but get rid of the like more frustrating aspects.

There is still a little bit of that right, it’s more contained we don’t want somebody to have a portal that overlooks the entire map it’s more like “Okay I can see a section, I can camp from here”, but I shouldn’t be able to camp for 10 minutes straight.

Helldivers 2 is the Exception, Not the Rule

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What was the decision to keep the game free-to-play?

I mean I think you have to be with a creative shooter, I don’t know how you survive, otherwise. I mean, it may have worked for Helldivers 2, but I think that’s a very different experience, I think you kind of have to be free to play and certainly to hit our ambitions and our goals.

You know, Splitgate 1 had 22 million downloads, which for an indie game was a massive, massive success and financially a success. I think if you put a price tag on it, that would certainly limit our reach. We want to make this a massive hit. You know, I want to make a game that is playable on as many platforms so that as many people as possible can play.

Obviously, Helldivers 2 is very, very lore-heavy. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated just to the lore and making up their own stories, et cetera. How lore-heavy is Splitgate 2 going to be?

Yeah, well we’ve got a few things we’re doing with lore. So I’d say the immediate things, obviously, are cinematic trailers. Our characters have backstories. Even though they’re, you know, all the characters are just skins, right? They’re not actual heroes. There are three classes and the characters are cosmetic. We also have comics that we’ve, our team has put together. You can download our app and we’ve got an iPhone and Android app where you can check out the comics. So a little bit more world-building there.

I think the biggest thing that lore does for us is more about just tying everything together. And so having lore, it helps you establish a consistent and cohesive art style and brand, UI, and all of the things that go into making a game and even play style. You know, it kind of all starts with like, what is the universe you’re building? Let’s build to that and make it consistent so I think a lot of times it’s more of a subconscious thing that makes you feel like you’re part of something real and an actual universe that you can ***** into. which you don’t necessarily get that from Splitgate 1 where it’s fun but it’s a bit scattered.

What is something that you never get to share? Something that you never get asked, something that you’re desperate to tell people, but no journalist is bothered asking you, and you’re just like, “Somebody ask me!”.

I’ll tell you a fun story actually that’s Gamescom-related since we’re here. So I started this company in January 2017 with my co-founder Nicholas Begamian, who’s awesome and he’s not in at Gamescom this time because he has real work to do. But in August of 2017 we graduated from Stanford in June and in August we thought “What better way to get introduced to this industry that we know nothing about than just going to Gamescom, going to Devcom, having a bunch of meetings, and just meeting people and learning what we can”?.

And so that was 2017 and we did that and I’ve got two fun stories from that. So fun story number one is on day one of Gamescom we came across a booth called Thunder ******. I don’t know if they’re still around but I still have their mouse. It was a gaming PC company and we saw that they were playing Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 and they didn’t have long lines at their booth.

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People are here to see new games and so we went up to them and I told them, guys, you know, people are here to see stuff that isn’t released, not just games they can go play whenever they want. You know, we’d be happy to give you guys alpha codes to our game.

And thankfully they actually took a chance on us and they let us put our game in their booth. We actually didn’t even have a stable build when I committed to that. So we immediately sprinted home, back to the Airbnb, jet-lagged, worked till 6 in the morning to get a build that would run, took an hour-long nap, headed over here, and then put the build on the computers.

I mean I think you have to be with a creative shooter, I don’t know how you survive, otherwise.

We had a pretty big booth with a constant line of people playing all day and it was awesome. That put us on the map because we went from this tiny little game, still very indie at the time but just like the two of us, and no press no players just our friends playing once a month, to all of a sudden we’ve got a few thousand alpha signups we got a handful of articles saying nice things about us. That really kind of jump-started and kicked things off.

The other really fun story I’ll tell you, that’s a great question, by the way. You should always ask people this because you never know what you’ll find out.

During this time, there was a gamer who played in our booth named Damon. And Damon came up to us after playing. He really liked the game and he asked us are we hiring I told him yeah actually we’re we’re looking for an animator – because at this time it was the two of us we actually had a part-time level designer and no one else and we needed an animator to make our first-person animations.

This 17-year-old **** from Germany, Damon, says “I’m an animator” and we’re thinking you know sure you are right and but he shows us some work that he had done he just made a bunch of Counter-Strike mods making animations for the net over the last seven years, self-taught and it was really good!

So we ended up hiring Damon after that event and he did all the animations in Splitgate 1 and he’s still with us today seven years later! I got to see him today when he came to the booth and now he’s working on Splitgate 2. And it’s really awesome.

You know, you think about the lives you’ve impacted like that. And like, this was a **** who was going into some desk job that he wasn’t passionate about, but because of Splitgate’s success, you know, he’s now doing what he loves, working on a game he loves, making animations. And that is, to me, just the most awesome thing about 1047.

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