Featured image source: Eduard Galeev / Pexels
1047 Games spent ten years building Splitgate into one of the better arena shooters nobody quite managed to keep alive at scale. On September 3, the studio pulled the plug on the part that made it feel like a live game. Dedicated servers and matchmaking for both Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and its sci-fi shooter Empulse are gone, replaced by peer-to-peer hosting and a server browser. You can still play. Nobody is building anything new for either game again.
That would be a big enough story on its own. It also happens to be one entry on a list that keeps growing. Between now and the end of October, at least six games are losing either their online functionality, their spot on the PlayStation Store, or both, and the pattern behind all of them is the same one that has been showing up in gaming headlines all year: live-service math that never worked out, and a storefront that is getting more aggressive about cleaning house.
The short version
- What happened today: 1047 Games shut down dedicated servers for Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and Empulse, moving both to peer-to-peer play with no further content updates
- What’s next: GRID Legends, Tower of Fantasy, Sociable Soccer 25, Hawked, Railbreak and Let It Die are all losing online features, store availability, or both through the end of October
- The bigger picture: Sony has pulled roughly 1,200 titles from the PlayStation Store since January as part of its most aggressive storefront cleanup to date
- Why it keeps happening: dedicated servers cost money every month a game is live, and a growing list of titles never earned enough to justify the bill
What actually changed for Splitgate and Empulse
1047 Games had been signaling this for a while. The studio said plainly that neither Splitgate: Arena Reloaded nor Empulse was generating the revenue needed to keep dedicated servers running, and that its next project would move away from live-service shooters entirely. Rather than shutting the games off outright, the team spent the last few weeks building a peer-to-peer alternative: players can still host matches, browse for open lobbies, and play with friends, they just won’t be doing it on 1047’s own server infrastructure anymore.
Empulse got a small farewell gift before the switch, a final new map, along with a permanent price cut across every region. It reads like the studio trying to leave both games in a playable, generous state rather than walking away mid-sentence, which is more than a lot of live-service shutdowns manage. But make no mistake about what peer-to-peer support means in practice: no more balance patches, no more seasonal content, no more anti-cheat updates. The games are frozen exactly where they stand today.
The rest of September’s shutdown list
Splitgate and Empulse are the freshest entries, not the only ones. Several other titles are losing online functionality or disappearing from digital shelves before October arrives, for reasons ranging from disappointing sales to a straightforward remake replacing the original.
| Game | Platforms affected | What’s ending | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| GRID Legends | PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One | Online modes, cross-play, leaderboards. Campaign stays playable. PC and Switch unaffected | September 11 |
| Tower of Fantasy | PS4 | In-game purchases end September 22, full console client shuts down | October 20 |
| Sociable Soccer 25 | PS5 | Online services shut down; already pulled from the PS Store | September 28 |
| Hawked | PS5 | Removed from the PlayStation Store after a short, quiet run | Already delisted |
| Railbreak | PS4 | Delisted to make room for the PS5 remake, Railbreak DX. Upgrade path for existing owners is unclear | Already delisted |
| Let It Die | PS4 | Online service ends after nearly ten years | September 1 |
A couple of these are worth sitting with longer than a table row allows. Let It Die running for close to a decade is the exception, not the rule, a genuinely long life for a free-to-play PS4 game, and its shutdown feels more like a graceful retirement than a mercy killing. Railbreak is the strange one: it isn’t failing so much as being replaced, and Sony hasn’t clarified whether the people who already bought the original get any credit toward the remake, which is exactly the kind of detail that tends to get lost when a delisting happens quietly on a Tuesday.
Why the list never seems to get shorter
None of this is really about any single studio being careless. Running dedicated servers is a fixed monthly cost that does not care how a game is reviewed or how fondly players remember it. A shooter needs enough concurrent players to justify that bill indefinitely, not just at launch, and the live-service boom of the last several years produced far more of these games than the market could sustain. When a title’s population thins out, the server bill stays exactly the same size while the revenue funding it keeps shrinking. Eventually the spreadsheet wins.
What has changed recently is the scale of the cleanup on Sony’s side specifically. The PlayStation Store has removed roughly 1,200 titles since January, starting with a bulk purge of ThiGames shovelware and continuing in smaller, steadier waves ever since. Most of what gets swept up is genuinely obscure, but the campaign has widened enough this year to catch first-party exclusives and licensed racers, not just asset-flip filler nobody would miss.
Delisted is not always the same as gone
If you already own a delisted game, it typically stays in your library and stays playable, sometimes indefinitely, sometimes only until the servers that verify your license go down too. That distinction between “can’t buy it anymore” and “can’t play it anymore” is the one worth checking game by game before you assume the worst, or assume you’re safe.
The ownership question sitting underneath all of it
Every one of these shutdowns lands a little differently depending on how you think about what a digital purchase actually gets you. That question has been getting louder across the industry all year, and it’s the same one that came up when Sony’s own terms of service quietly reminded players that PlayStation games are licensed to you, not sold outright. A license can be switched off. A disc, mostly, cannot.
It’s also why the preservation argument has stopped being a niche complaint and started showing up in front of actual lawmakers. The advocacy group Stop Killing Games, which pushes publishers to leave games in a playable state after official support ends, has already gotten its case in front of EU regulators, arguing that a purchase which can be revoked at a publisher’s convenience was never really a purchase to begin with. Splitgate and Empulse, to their credit, land on the better end of that argument: both remain playable indefinitely through peer-to-peer support. GRID Legends, Sociable Soccer 25 and Tower of Fantasy are messier cases, losing entire modes or, eventually, the ability to launch at all.
What to actually do about it
There’s no trick that reverses a shutdown once a publisher has decided the servers are coming down. A few things are still worth doing before the date on the calendar arrives.
- Check your own library against the list above. If you own any of these, note the actual date functionality changes, not just the headline date, since purchases, online modes and full playability often end at different times.
- Download anything you might want later while it’s still available. Delisted does not always mean unplayable, but it usually means you can no longer redownload it if you delete it first.
- Don’t assume peer-to-peer means safe forever. It’s a better outcome than a full shutdown, but it still depends on enough players sticking around to fill a lobby.
Bottom line
Splitgate losing its dedicated servers is a small, almost gentle version of a story that usually ends worse. The bigger story is the list it belongs to: six games, six different reasons, one month. Sony spent this week’s State of Play showcase selling players on everything new coming to PlayStation. Quietly, in the background, the platform keeps deciding what doesn’t get to stay.
