In 2025, developer 1047 Games appeared at Summer Game Fest to unveil Splitgate 2, but things quickly fell apart when CEO Ian Proulx took the stage in a MAGA-styled “Make FPS Great Again” hat to poke fun at Call of Duty and Halo for trend-chasing, just for his recent sequel to incorporate a battle royale mode and $80 microtransactions. The sport was soon ‘unlaunched’ and re-entered beta amid layoffs on the studio, but its re-release didn’t fare a lot better, opening to a concurrent peak of just 2,297 players.
So, now that Insider Gaming has exclusively revealed that 1047 Games is developing a self-proclaimed Titanfall and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3-inspired shooter, dubbed Empulse, it’s hardly surprising that no one is convinced. “Didn’t Splitgate 2 already dangle Titanfall-shaped keys in front of us?” asked u/FrogPissDrinker (possibly the weirdest Reddit username I’ve quoted). “What’s with these FPS studios shoving ‘It’s like Titanfall!’ into their marketing these days? First it was Splitgate, then Highguard, and now this.”
“I Don’t Trust The Splitgate Developers One Bit”
Judging by the reactions online, it’s protected to say that Proulx’s stunt at SGF last 12 months has irreparably marred the studio’s status, and it will be an uphill battle to win back what goodwill the team once had. All that anybody is mentioning straight away is the hat, which Proulx doubled down on in subsequent interviews where he reiterated that he’s “bored with playing the identical Call of Duty yearly,” arguing that “the state of multiplayer FPS games is tragically stale.”
Yet there’s nothing unique about this recent project. An FPS game with wall-running and sliding is not revolutionary anymore, even when there are mechs across the map to search out, and Splitgate 2 was already widely criticized for being derivative of higher games (or, as Proulx would put it, stale), while also falling prey to the identical predatory MTX that has been plaguing the industry. Will Empulse be any different? “Knowing what happened to Splitgate, I would not get my hopes up,” u/PixieGoosie said.
A cutback studio reeling from the disastrous launch of Splitgate 2 shifting gears to a desperate attempt at re-bottling the lightning that was Titanfall 2, spearheaded by a controversial CEO eager to re-capture the glory days, is hardly essentially the most promising pitch, but time will tell. Whatever finally ends up happening, 1047 Games has quite a bit to prove.