What have you been playing lately? It seems a lot of players on Steam have opted for two fresh shooters: Splitgate and Back 4 Blood jumped into the Top 10 on Steam over the weekend.
These are the games in question: Over the course of the weekend, two games impressed that are currently still in beta and not yet fully released. One of them is:
- The portal shooter Splitgate, which recently performed so well that its servers crashed.
- And the new beta for Back 4 Blood, the spiritual successor to the Left-4-Dead series.
Both games managed to secure a spot in the Top 10 of the Steam charts over the weekend (via PC Gamer).
This is how the first beta phase for Back 4 Blood went
Here are the numbers for Back 4 Blood: Back 4 Blood gathered quite a few players during its first early access beta (via Steam DB).
- On Friday, August 6th, the peak was over 88,000 players.
- On Saturday, it even reached 98,024 players – a high point.
- Sunday brought in around 81,000 players at peak as well.
On Monday evening, August 9th at 9:00 PM, this first early access beta ends. The next chance to take a look at the game will be between August 12th and 16th – then an open beta starts, for which no key is required. The game will be fully released on October 12, 2021.
Cortyn from MeinMMO also took a look at the Back 4 Blood beta over the weekend, after initial alpha doubts. However, the beta version did so much right that Back 4 Blood may now even have the potential to be Cortyn’s co-op game of the year. You can read Cortyn’s impression of the Back 4 Blood beta here.
What kind of game is this actually? In Back 4 Blood, you can face a zombie threat with up to four players. It offers a co-op campaign that you must complete together. You can choose from 8 characters, each with their own unique abilities. There is also a PvP mode.
Splitgate continues to gather players
Here are the numbers for Splitgate: Splitgate also gathered a ton of players over the weekend – at least on Steam.
- On Friday, the peak was about 63,000 players
- On Saturday, it was slightly less with around 60,000
- On Sunday, 67,724 players were attracted to Splitgate on Steam – a record for the portal shooter on Steam.
This is the situation with Splitgate: Splitgate has been in early access since 2019 but launched an open beta for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC (Steam) on July 13. The console release was accompanied by an unexpected surge in popularity that pushed the developers’ server structure to its limits. The originally scheduled release of Splitgate for July 27 had to be postponed to adapt to the larger player base.
In the meantime, there had been wait times of over 90 minutes for players wanting to test Splitgate. However, since then improvements have been made, as reported by the official Twitter channel (via Twitter). This was apparently noticeable over the weekend. Currently, it is rated as “very positive” on Steam (via Steam).
What kind of game is this actually? Splitgate is a free multiplayer shooter from indie developer 1047 Games, which has already been compared to the Halo series or Unreal Tournament in terms of its approach.
You can fight in various arenas that offer a unique twist: You can use portals to jump from place to place. Alternatively, you can shoot through a portal and hit enemies in a completely different location on the map.
If you want to try Splitgate, you can do so cross-platform; the beta is still open. It is definitely among the games that MeinMMO recommends in August 2021.
