Splitgate

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

A fast arena shooter that layers player-created portals over classic FPS combat. After a beta that drew millions of players within weeks, the title's original bespoke backend became the limiting factor on everything from matchmaking to progression.

Requirement

The game's custom monolithic backend was feature-rich but difficult to scale and costly to extend. The work was to move online services onto a supported online services suite — matchmaking and lobbies, progression, battle pass, challenges, leaderboards and platform achievements — with the game live and player records numbering in the millions. Downtime and data loss were not options.

Approach

Engineers were embedded into the backend program as part of the professional services effort, working on systems, backend and tools programming against the AccelByte SDK and Online Services Suite.

Work covered achievements, leaderboards and matchmaking integration, with backend performance optimization to keep service behavior stable under live load. Tooling was built out alongside the integration so the client team could operate and extend the new services after handover.

Delivery scope

• Backend programming
• Systems programming
• Tools programming
• AccelByte OSS / SDK integration
• Matchmaking and lobby services
• Progression, battle pass and challenge systems
• Leaderboards and platform achievements
• Backend performance optimization

Results

• Online services migrated with the game live; player records moved without a service break
• Revamped progression and matchmaking systems shipped to players in the Season 2 update, June 2022
• Backend moved from a bespoke monolith to a supported, extensible services platform
• 16–32 person-months delivered, across 2–4 backend engineers
• Cross-platform account, achievement and leaderboard parity across Steam and PlayStation

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.