Splitgate, the shooter that combined Halo and Portal, will be ending new feature development, according to a tweet from the developer, 1047 Games. The team released Splitgate into beta in July of 2021 and quickly built a player base of 600,000 in their first week. 1047 Games was a small, indie team at the time, and after Splitgate’s success, they received additional funding and grew their team. However, in their press release, 1047 Games stated that they struggled to implement new features on top of the existing codebase. They have decided to cease new feature development on Splitgate, and instead to move on to a sequel. The current version of Splitgate will remain live, and they plan to push smaller, free updates going forward.
This approach is very similar to what Blizzard chose to do with Overwatch. Overwatch 2 is slated to launch later this year. Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 in late 2019, and stopped releasing new heroes an maps in 2020. This move lead to a waning player in Overwatch, but time will show if those players return for Overwatch 2.
Hopefully, 1047 Games can get their sequel out while their existing player base still wants it.