An online marketing/analytics company called Streamforge has shared a ‘freebie’ of sorts on LinkedIn, and we think it’s one gamers will be interested in.
Streamforge co-founder Nick Lombardi has shared a report on Splitgate 2’s failed launch. Seeing as their company specializes in analytics for content creators, Lombardi’s report focused on how studio 1047 Games went about working with game streamers.
Not that this is much of a spoiler, but as you already know, Splitgate 2 has already flopped out the gate. Two weeks after the PR disaster 1047 Games and their CEO Ian Proulx created during Summer Game Fest, 1047 Games announced redundancies. Proulx alongside co-founder Nicholas Bagamian chose not to be paid, as they prepare the game for its next phase.
As a live service game, Splitgate 2 still has a chance to rally back, but this is now an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. 1047 Games had an influencer marketing budget of $ 408,542, with over 80 % spent on Twitch streamers. That may already sound like too much money to spend on marketing, but this is chump change compared to what Microsoft spent to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 the biggest launch and title in the franchise’s history. For Splitgate 2, the devil is in the details.
76 % of the content creators 1047 worked with were from the US, and over 82 % were male. They chose to work with a larger number of medium size streamers and gave them modest paydays for their official promotion, with no one getting above $ 26,000. Lombardi’s key findings really fell under his market capture analysis.
In his words:
The data shows modest conversion rates: Splitgate 2 captured approximately 2% of relevant Twitch creators and 1% of YouTube creators from this target group. These figures are significantly lower than standout performers like inZOI (19%) or DOOM: The Dark Ages (35% on YouTube), and even trail recent releases like Atomfall (7% combined).
The low capture rates are particularly surprising given the original Splitgate’s popularity among content creators and the franchise’s built-in audience. This suggests the new direction and mixed reception may have dampened creator enthusiasm.
This leads in well to Lombardi’s conclusions:
Despite the $408k influencer investment and 27.4 million total views, Splitgate 2’s launch was catastrophic. The game lost over 96% of its Steam player base within a month, dropping from 25,785 concurrent players at launch to under 1,000 by early July. Steam reviews settled at “Mixed” (60% positive), with many players criticizing the diminished role of portals and generic map design.
Professional critics echoed these concerns, with PC Gamer (60/100) and IGN (7/10) noting that the sequel felt like a “less interesting version of Apex Legends” that had lost the original’s unique identity. The move to mainstream appeal had alienated the core fanbase without attracting sufficient new players.
While 1047 Games knows what mistakes they made when it came to launching and ‘promoting’ Splitgate 2, Lombardi’s study demonstrates that this was not a problem that you could solve by throwing money at it. But then again, bigger game companies also learned that lesson with live service flubs like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and Concord.
Splitgate 2 will stand as a cautionary tale in a genre that’s already stifled by fierce competition for a limited player base. We won’t say that we know the right way to guarantee success in live service, but 1047 Games demonstrates how easy it is to fumble everything straight out the gate.
