In many ways, a portal-infused shooter Divided door was an undeniable success. The freemium title surpassed 13 million downloads while still in open beta and has reached an all-time high of around 68,000 concurrent players on Steam about three years ago.
As interest in the project increases, developer 1047 Games raised over $100 million in funding through an investment that valued the studio at $1.5 billion. The company has openly admitted that Divided door “it has achieved a level of success that we could not have predicted and that few indie games are fortunate enough to achieve.”
That acknowledgement, however, was included in a statement that confirmed that the study would no longer support the shooter. Why? It had simply become too successful, too fast. “We’re kind of bailing out the water and trying to keep everyone who has bought a ticket to our ship happy, and at the same time trying to turn our ship into a rocket,” the company added, in 2022.
At the time, 1047 Games said it was saying “see you soon” to the title rather than “goodbye.” Now, the company is back with Divided door 2a full-blown sequel featuring a new faction system, four-versus-four gameplay, and (of course) lots of blood portals.
Speaking to Game Developer about how 1047 Games will ensure the sequel can last a long time, the studio's founder, CEO and Divided door 2 Creative director Ian Proulx says the company is now fully aware that “content is everything.”
1047 Games Boss' Hopes Divided door 2 will continue to thrive in a decade
“I want [Splitgate 2] to be a game that people will be playing in 10 years, on a much larger scale, obviously,” Proulx says. “I think we had 200,000 concurrent players in Divided door at our peak. Success for me would be more than that, and more of that in the years to come.”
Proulx believes that the studio could not have done much to support the original title because it was exhausted. “We didn't have the resources [to support Splitgate]. We didn't have the technology,” he says. “Our thinking was, 'We're going to have an increase in players. We're going to have slow, steady growth over time.'
“Even if we knew [that wasn’t going to be the case]there wasn't much we could have done about it. We were a very small team [of under 20 people]So we were just struggling to keep the lights on with Divided door.”
To prevent a repeat, Proulx has been “obsessed” with what it takes to deliver a “world-class” live ops experience. The key, he says, is to make sure 1047 Games is on the cutting edge when launch day rolls around.[We have to be] technically ready, in terms of servers. But we also need to be content-wise ready and make sure we have a lot of stuff coming in,” he continues.
We ask Proulx to explain his admission that the development Divided door it was akin to bailing water out of a sinking ship. Elaborating, he explains that 1047 Games struggled to convince Divided door players to stick around for more than a month, further increasing the pressure on an already winded team. The interest was there, but players had no reason to properly engage with the shooter.
“Content is king,” says Proulx. “That's one thing I've learned for sure: players always want more. I'll put it this way: in Divided door we've seen players come in and play for about three or four weeks, and they're having a great time and they're leaving a good review, but after that [that period] most players would have nothing left to do.
“It took us about seven months to deliver a new season with content. The way I look at it this time is, step one, I have to make sure that Divided door 2 it has enough content. Instead of three or four weeks as a typical play pattern, I need to extend it. Hopefully, to six, eight, twelve, twenty, thirty weeks. Whatever it is, I need it to be longer.
“This is to give the team more time [to develop new content]. So when that number comes around (because inevitably it doesn’t matter if you have the best game on the planet), when that happens we will have to have shipped a major content update.”
Proulx explains that the development team is putting a lot of “care” into defining small updates, medium updates, and large updates. He says these variable additions will provide a sense of momentum, and notes that a small update might be a “featured game” while a medium update might be a “new map.” He envisions larger updates like full seasons, but reiterates that the team is still working out the details.
On a technical level, Proulx is adamant Divided door 2 needs to be infinitely more scalable than its predecessor, and says 1047 Games now has the staff to make it happen. “Once we get funding [for Splitgate]“It forced us to think, ‘Wow, we could do a lot of things if we could do this again,’” he says, likening the original to a “school project” that was pushed to its limits.
“[We thought] Wouldn't it be nice to redo these things? Wouldn't it be nice to redo the code and make it more scalable? And when I say scalable, I mean scalable both in terms of handling more players and having more people working on it. Our code base in Divided door It was fine for 20 people, but with 175 people it was very easy to step on each other's toes. So we restructured a lot of the code so that if someone works on a gun, for example, they don't break a character.
“We thought about the [prospect of a redo] very early on, but eventually he said “that's not a good idea because we're still learning a lot. We have a huge player base. People love this thing. We need to keep doing it.” I'm a big believer in “you have to be a student of the game,” but just over a year [later] we decided it was time to move on. At that point, we felt like we had done everything we needed to learn to make our dream game.”
Proulx plans to remain a student after the launch of Divided door 2 in 2025, but explains that 1047 now has the capacity and foresight to adapt more effectively. “We have a plan, and by the way, the plan is totally bogus and will definitely change. But at least we have a rough plan that is good on paper. We have the resources to build towards [that]but we've structured it so that there's not too much bureaucracy,” he continues.
“We know that by the time we launch we're going to learn a lot of things and that plan is going to go down the drain. That's part of the [learning curve]. Another part is having content in our back pocket, so if there are any fires of any kind we’ll be ahead of the curve instead of having to play catch-up all the time. We also have redundancy in the team itself, so if someone gets hit by a bus we have a number two ready.”
Outsourcing partners are part of the plan for Divided door 2
1047 Games has already enlisted the help of outsourcing partners, who aren’t doing much yet but can provide assistance if (or maybe when) things get going. Proulx says these structures are in place because he’s an optimist who believes in planning for success.
“[I ask] “What will happen in the best case?” he says. “I am very confident in the game. We are giving [our outsourcing partners] a bit of everything [across art, animation, and audio] so that if and when this game takes off, we'll already have the contract. We've got the relationship, and now we're just going to get it out there.”
Proulx's sense of optimism extends to the broader video game industry. When asked how developers can thrive in an environment that seems poised to crush all but the biggest success stories, he suggests that adversity is an opportunity for growth. “I think we're a couple of years away from coming out of this [situation],” he says. “There's definitely a hole that's been dug and an overcorrection, [but] I'm still optimistic. I think you're going to see a lot of really good games announced.
“I think we'll see more successes. The best companies will come out of the bad times, because they're the ones that face adversity and keep going, just like we did. They'll be the ones that learn the most, that find a way to win when it's tough. If they can do that, when things pick up again they'll do an amazing job.”
