At the time of writing, just as the United States of Games Players are beginning to wake up, ARC Raiders has 159,483 people playing. PUBG: Battlegrounds has 597,408. Meanwhile, the free Splitgate: Arena Reloaded has 556. In fairness, a few hours back, that peaked at 1,070, the best numbers it’s seen since Christmas Day. For a game that only officially (re)launched on December 4, that’s…it’s not good. It’s very, very bad. But developers 1047 Games are trying to put a positive spin on things.
The game once known as Splitgate 2 has had a self-inflicted rough time. Originally launched June last year, the sequel to 2019’s free-to-play multiplayer shooter was then un-launched in July in response to a cacophony of negative reaction, the game’s lack of basic features like leaderboards, and its grim microtransaction prices. None of this was helped by 1047’s CEO Ian Proulx wearing a MAGA-meme hat in a Summer Games Fest set in the middle of LA’s disgraceful ICE raids, and then trying to milk the impotent controversy for as long as possible.
After five months away, the game was re-released early last month, and you’d be forgiven for not having noticed. While Splitgate: Arena Reloaded saw a half-decent 27,000 people show up on Steam soon after its original June 6 launch, that number had plummeted to under 2,000 by the time the game wriggled back into beta July 22. So its relaunch last month to a peak of 2,297 players on PC is catastrophically bad. And that was its peak, meaning the number of people simultaneously playing the game on Steam over the last month is failing to beat the worst of the tail-off from before the game was pulled.
We must remember, Steam is but one of the ways people can play Splitgate, and doesn’t account for console numbers at all. Of course, an online, free-to-play multiplayer shooter would traditionally tend to find a good portion of its audience on PC, but we don’t have the data to show otherwise. As 1047 puts it in a brief, extremely defensive statement posted to its official X account, Steam numbers “show one number, on one platform, at one given moment.” Which is partially true. SteamDB, the source of all these PC figures, show the numbers at all given moments, and maps them to a graph. Yes, they don’t show how many copies have sold, but they do tell you how many people are playing at any given point. And it’s barely any. Right now, seven times more people are playing Your Mom.
1047 Games Responds to Recent Steam Charts Conversations pic.twitter.com/ir9W0BjFHo
— SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded (@Splitgate) January 6, 2026
The statement begins with an unimpeachably true statement, however. “Steam Charts don’t measure fun.” There’s no denying this, and if the 1,000 people who are persisting with the game a month after its re-release are having a great time, then all power to them. We all know excellent games that unfairly failed to find an audience, and 1047 absolutely should be defending a game its proud of and boasting about its community. It also remains the case that when those games are based on a freemium model where income comes from players buying in-game items, then its long-term potential is somewhat limited.
The statement is defiant, maintaining “The 1047 team remains committed to delivering the best version of Spligate possible,” and thanking the players the game does have. It also implores people to give the game a try, arguing “the gameplay’s the best it’s ever been, and we’d love for you to jump in and form your own opinion.” But what the post doesn’t do is provide any data for console sales to bolster the opening point that people only know how it’s performing on PC.
It must be so awful, to have worked so hard on a game, and then to have had the enormous setback of a failed launch, only to re-emerge after months more effort and for no one to show up despite the game being free. I can’t even imagine. Yet, I really don’t know if putting out a statement responding to Redditors being rude about SteamDB numbers is the most professional look. Still, it’s working—we’re writing about the game as a consequence, and perhaps that’ll inspire a few more people to give the game a look. I kinda hope it works.
Damn the playercount is lower than your studio name. pic.twitter.com/kgdyGxs4vu
— DANNYonPC (@DANNYonPC) January 6, 2026
Oof.
