This month saw the release of 1047 Games’ Splitgate 2 and Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak. While quite different from each other in gameplay and tone, both are self-published, live-service FPS games from Western developers — and that will define the future of their respective studios. These releases also provide insight into the state of the PC/console FPS market and the degree to which new entrants can claim a share of it. How have these two launches fared thus far, and what might it mean for the future of these two studios?

FPS on Steam: Massive but Highly Concentrated Market

Before diving into the specific games, let's explore the bigger picture. First-person shooters are incredibly popular on Steam. Despite being the 66th most frequently applied tag to a game, six of the top 10 games by CCU are tagged as FPS, as of the time of writing. This difference alone gives some indication as to the nature of the market: It is dominated by a few massive live-services titles, relative to other, more frequently applied user tags like “adventure” or “RPG.”

FPS titles make up an inordinate amount of Steam’s total in-game CCU, indicating a large-scale demand for the genre that makes it an attractive target for developers like 1047 and Remedy. These studios seek to carve out profitable niches in the more granular categories of arena shooters and movement shooters (Splitgate 2) or horror-infused co-op PvE (FBC: Firebreak).

Recent years have seen a number of new entrants try to crack this market with mixed results. Embark Studios’ competitive PVP title The Finals has ranked in the top 25 within the subgenre by peak CCU in 2024 and 2025 after its launch in late 2023 despite losing 80% of its CCU (Naavik has separately reported on Embark and the broader FPS market in detail), while viral indie hit BattleBit Remastered, released the same year, currently sits outside the top 150. And then high-profile venture-backed startups like Mountaintop Studios, developer of Spectre Divide, have shut down completely after failing to find an audience.

But the market is not totally impenetrable: Tencent’s military sim Delta Force has performed relatively well and has yet to benefit from its forthcoming console launch, and NetEase’s FragPunk has held onto a decent portion of its sizable launch CCU. Both are free-to-play titles from historically mobile-focused Chinese publishers that are increasingly active in the shooter market (both first- and third-person) on PC via the free-to-play model. Of the top 10 free-to-play PVP shooters released since 2024, all of the top five are from Chinese developers. 

Splitgate 2 

Where does this leave Splitgate 2? 1047 Games’ follow-up to its 2019 release — developed as a university side project by co-founders and Stanford roommates Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian, and which went viral in 2021 — has a bigger budget, a bigger headcount, and bigger expectations. 

Shortly after the original’s open beta reached a reported peak of 200K CCU across Steam and consoles in summer 2021, 1047 raised a $100M round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Insight Partners, Anthos Capital, Vgames, and Lakestar as additional venture investors. In total, the studio has raised $130M, according to Pitchbook.

In 2022, the studio announced it would stop developing new features and content for the original Splitgate in order to focus on a new project, which was revealed in July 2024 to be Splitgate 2. While the first game was developed by a team of 15 people, by September 2024, the studio had grown to 175, with additional use of external development providers. 

Among 1047 Games’ peers — new, Western studios launching AAA-quality F2P first-shooters on PC and console — Embark Studios and Mountaintop Studios are perhaps the closest competition, and each represents a different potential outcome for the studio. 

Embark, based in Sweden, raised money from a strategic (Nexon), which then swiftly acquired a controlling stake only seven months later in 2019, with the studio’s first game, The Finals, still over four years from release. Now, Embark is preparing to launch its second game, extraction shooter Arc Raiders.

Mountaintop Studios, meanwhile, shares more in common with 1047 Games: Both are U.S.-based studios that raised funds from venture firms to self-publish first-person shooters with unique gameplay twists. 1047 has raised over 1.5 times the amount Mountaintop did and had nearly twice the headcount at the time of its game’s launch (according to LinkedIn data). 1047’s mission is to manage its burn rate more effectively than Mountaintop in order to find an audience as Embark did. To that effect, the studio announced a small round of layoffs on June 20th and that the founders would forgo their salaries.

Despite these efforts, 1047 Games has a steep, but not impossible, hill to climb. Its launch was marred by a number of minor controversies, from game-breaking technical issues at the start of its open beta, to Proulx’s apparent unawareness of highly priced in-game purchases that he blamed on a former monetization lead “who came from Call of Duty.”

The FPS market on PC/console has also changed in some significant ways since the first Splitgate, or even since development began on Splitgate 2. 

For one, it has internationalized significantly, particularly in Asia. Titles like Valorant cater heavily to a global audience through in-game characters and places, localization, marketing, and esports. Tencent and NetEase have muscled their way into the Western market and brought Chinese players along with them. The Splitgate franchise, meanwhile, proudly harkens back to the glory days of Halo and Unreal Tournament, when Western (and particularly American) studios and players had dominated the genre. 

Proulx, 1047’s co-founder, caused a stir when he announced Splitgate 2’s official release on stage at Summer Games Fest in a “Make FPS Great Again” hat, for which he later apologized. But it's perhaps emblematic of 1047’s philosophy and intended audience. According to Alinea Analytics, 52% of PlayStation’s Splitgate 2 players and 48% of the game’s players on Steam are in the U.S. The game’s interface has 16 different localizations, including Chinese, but 83% of its Steam reviews are in English, considerably more than its peer titles. One potential avenue for growth, or at least to stem its decline, could be to more fully embrace the globalized market, as its peers have done, through more localization and region-specific content and marketing. 

Overall, the worst outcome for Splitgate 2 is that it cannot stabilize its CCU curve before its venture money runs out. This would likely cause the studio to go under, as it would be difficult to secure additional financing at that point. Even successfully stemming its (very normal) CCU decline may not save the studio from significant cuts to operating expenses since it is already operating at subscale compared to its successful peers like The Finals. If the game can stabilize, even at low volume, it opens up a new set of options, such as an acquisition or a publishing arrangement.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, but at that point, Splitgate 2 might become a target for a deep-pocketed partner looking to enter the FPS market with a high-quality asset it could scale back up on its own terms. 

Palia, a venture-backed MMO from studio Singularity 6, which exited to Daybreak for a small sum after failing to find a large enough player base, is a potential model here. Canadian developer Digital Extremes is another example: It slowly grew its F2P shooter Warframe from a tepid 2014 launch through a 2016 acquisition by Chinese company Leyou (which in turn was bought by Tencent in 2020), and has now become a consistent, if relatively undersung, success story. 

FBC: Firebreak

Despite Splitgate 2’s challenges, its release has gone better than June’s other PC/console live-services FPS launch. Remedy’s new title, FBC: Firebreak, is a first for the famed studio in a number of critical ways: It’s the studio’s first self-published game and first multiplayer/live-services game. The optimal outcome for this title is that it becomes proof of Remedy’s maturation as a business that can diversify into new genres and business models without requiring a publishing partner. It’s also a way to further become a top-tier creative force that can successfully extend its Remedy Connected Universe across multiple titles.

So far, the launch has been rocky. FBC: Firebreak saw a peak of 1,992 concurrent Steam players on its first day, which dwindled to just 309 one week later. On Metacritic, the game has a Metascore (aggregation of professional critic reviews) of 64, and a user score of 5.4.

The game itself is a three-player co-op PVE shooter with various repeatable missions (called “jobs”) to play through with randomized elements making each run unique. A loose narrative framework surrounds this gameplay structure, connecting it to the events of Control, Remedy’s 2019 narrative action game that was published by 505 Games and won many Game of the Year awards from the likes of IGN, Game Informer, and others. Alan Wake II from 2023, which received similar recognition and was published by Epic Games, also exists in this same narrative universe.

FBC: Firebreak is not free-to-play; it’s priced at $39.99. VGInsights estimates a gross Steam revenue of $1.4M thus far, which would be nearly $980K after Steam’s 30% cut. Remedy also struck deals with Sony and Microsoft to add the game to the PlayStation and Xbox subscription services from day one. Inderes, a Finnish financial firm, estimated the value of those deals for Remedy at €10M, or $11.6M, but some portion of this value may be dependent upon player engagement.

Still, if accurate, that implies Remedy may have pencilled in $12M-$13M from FBC: Firebreak within the first two weeks of launch from the combination of Steam sales and subscription deals, but excluding console sales or Epic Games Store revenue, all of which are likely relatively smaller contributions. This is against a self-reported budget of €30M, or $34.8M. 

Inderes takes a negative forecast, expecting the game to “generate only about 50% of the capital invested in the project by 2028,” implying sales of around $4.8M over the next two and a half years. Considering the title’s cripplingly low CCU count, and the effort (and additional capital) required to reinvigorate it, that will be an uphill battle.

As Remedy itself describes on its website, self-publishing projects carry the “highest financial risk but also the greatest revenue potential through game royalties.” It made this strategic bet with FBC: Firebreak, whose first week on the market has been far from successful. But thanks to a controlled upfront budget, several additional projects and ongoing revenue streams, and the backing of public market and strategic investors (Tencent owns 14% of the company), one subpar bet — which could yet be turned around — will not break the company. 

While it may be laudable for Remedy to attempt an expansion into new genres and business models, is a project like FBC: Firebreak just a folly that fails to build on the company’s core competencies in single-player narrative?

Remedy has acknowledged player feedback around the game and has already shipped changes to ease player onboarding. Shortly before launch, the studio released a content roadmap through 2026 as well. With ongoing support, it's possible that Remedy may be able to grow player engagement. In any case, it cannot sink much further at this point. 

One model is Deep Rock Galactic, another midpriced co-op shooter that debuted with similar CCU numbers to FBC: Firebreak when it launched its early access in 2018. The game left early access in 2020 and has become a mainstay of the genre, now sporting CCU numbers that compare with genre leaders Helldivers II and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. And of course, FBC: Firebreak’s engagement may see a lift from marquee Remedy Connected Universe releases, such as the upcoming Control 2. 

Conclusion

The underwhelming launches of both Splitgate 2 and FBC: Firebreak show that breaking into the lucrative but top-heavy FPS market remains a challenge for independent studios — and so it is for established ones as well: Sony’s failure with Concord, and uncertainty around Bungie’s Marathon, is telling. It is still possible for Splitgate 2 and FBC: Firebreak to find some degree of success, but the challenge for both is to grow while managing burn rate. 

For Remedy, how it handles this challenge will shape the company’s growth trajectory from a successful single-player studio reliant on publishing partners to a more diversified and profitable multiproduct firm. For 1047 Games, the challenge of growing its new title is existential.

All recent breakthroughs in the FPS market, such as Delta Force, Once Human, and FragPunk, have been incubated by mega-publishers. Viral hits like BattleBit Remastered have achieved massive sales relative to the sizes of their team and capital investments, but have not held on to their audience. Other indie shooters that have stabilized into live-services success stories, such as Warframe, Deep Rock Galactic, or The Finals, did so only through being acquired, working with a publisher, or both. (Deep Rock Galactic, developed by Ghost Ship Games, was published by Coffee Stain Studios before Embracer purchased both companies). 

It is possible that finding long-term success in this massive genre, either at the top of the charts or by dominating a niche, requires the war chest of a diversified larger company. Can scrappier upstarts expect to claim market share at all, and if so, are 1047 or Remedy those teams? Splitgate 2 and FBC: Firebreak are far too early in their life cycles to make any final pronouncements, but if they hope to become the exception to this rule, their work is cut out for them. 

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In Other News

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• UK launches a new $40.5M fund to support British game development.
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📊 Business & Products:

• SD Gundam G Generation Eternal surpasses $100M in two months.
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• Google has quietly released its own standalone Instant Games app.

👾 Miscellaneous:

• Roblox wants to better reward creators for bringing players back.
• Netflix to delist over 20 mobile games from its library in July.
• True Gamers expands in Saudi Arabia with four new esports venues in Riyadh.
• Microsoft adds Steam games to its Xbox PC app on Windows.
• Frontier Developments removes generative AI use from Jurassic World Evolution 3.

Content Worth Consuming

Creating Emotionally Resonant Content for a Global Audience in Sky: Children of Light (gamesindustry.biz): “In today's global games industry, success isn’t just about going international — it's about making players everywhere feel emotionally connected. As games like Sky: Children of the Light reach massive global audiences, we face a creative challenge: how do we design content that feels truly meaningful to people from widely different cultures, languages, and life experiences? Thatgamecompany, the independent studio behind Journey, Flower, and Sky, is known for its emotionally rich, artful games that emphasize human connection over competition. Sky has received critical acclaim since its launch, including winning the Games for Impact Award at Gamescom 2023, and continues to earn praise for its innovative social gameplay and emotional depth.”

Flow to Flaws — Vibe Coding (Game Changers Podcast): “This week on Game Changers, host Josh Chapman explores one of the most promising — and potentially risky — frontiers in software: vibe coding. With the rise of AI and natural language processing, it’s now possible to build fully functioning apps and websites just by describing what you want. No programming skills required. But as vibe coding transforms who gets to build software and how fast they can do it, it also raises serious questions about security, scalability, and what happens when creators don’t know what their code is actually doing.”

Killer Instinct's Adam Boyes Tears Down the Walls (The Fourth Curtain): “Our guest this week is Adam Boyes, longtime co-CEO of Iron Galaxy and now founder of Vivrato. From Killer Instinct to The Last of Us Part I, he’s helped bring major games to life and now supports devs launching their own. We discuss putting in raunchy stuff, nemawashi and his magic deck of challenges.”

XCOM Creator Julian Gollop Shares Game Design Tips, Dev Stories, and More (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Trent Kusters chats with Julian Gollop, founder and game designer at Snapshot Games. Together they discuss his legendary journey designing games from the creation of the original XCOM: UFO Defense to his studio's latest release, Chip 'n Clawz vs. the Brainioids; how to use constraint as a key design pillar; having the courage to remove features for a better play experience; and when to lean on tried and true conventions and when to avoid them.”

How Borderlands 4 Mixes the Action Up with Fadefields and The Vault (gamesbeat.com): “Borderlands 4 has some clear runway now that Grand Theft Auto VI is coming next year instead of this year. The action role-playing first-person shooter looter game (now priced at $70 instead of the previously floated $80) is coming on September 12 on the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the Windows PC. I visited 2K’s Hangar 13 studio in Novato, California, and played a couple of hours of Borderlands 4. I have been writing up my impressions this week. I also interviewed the creative director of the game, Graeme Timmins, about what his goals were for the game and the kind of characters we’ll counter.”

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