Powering up

How 1047 Games went from dorm-room Halo to 13m players and a valuation of $1.5bn

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When Splitgate broke 100,000 concurrent players in July, it may have looked to some like the game was an overnight sensation, another to be filed next to Valheim or Fall Guys. But that success had been a very long time coming for the team at 1047 Games, which first released the game over two years earlier, for most of which time it was played by an audience a few orders of magnitude smaller than this fresh peak.

For the studio’s co-founder and CEO, Ian Proulx, the Splitgate story goes back further still – all the way to the early 2010s, in fact, when he was still in high school, and landed on the game’s winningly simple premise: what if Halo, but with portals?

But it hasn’t taken long for Splitgate’s player explosion to completely rewrite the studio’s fate. In May, as the game was gearing up to its second launch, 1047 raised $6.5 million in investor funding. In July, just as the game launched its open beta, there was what Proulx rather modestly calls “a quick follow-up round,” raising somewhere north of $10m. Eight weeks (and 13 million downloads) later, the studio raised a further $100m, valuing the company at $1.5bn. “Obviously, we would not have gotten this funding if we didn’t have the explosion of players,” Proulx says. “At least, not this much.”

It’s a strange situation for a small studio, whose first game (depending on how you count) isn’t even out yet, to find itself in. And potentially a precarious one, too. But however you look at it, it’s certainly a long way from