Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Splitgate released official native Linux support recently when the Open Beta went live, and it seems to be hitting it big pulling in plenty of regular players.

It's been so popular in fact, that their servers have repeatedly struggled to cope with the demand. We've done a few livestreams of it on our Twitch Channel, and we've seen how overloaded it has become a few times. The game even got the attention of Amazon AWS, who thought their servers were under some form of DDoS attack and ended up limiting them to "help".

On Steam alone, they've managed to hit a high of 8,980 just recently. Not quite the all-time high of 11,901 two years ago (when it first released) but right now during the Open Beta it's not even properly released either so it's looking good. Considering the repeated server issues too, it's a real show of strength. It does of course help that's it's free to play and fully cross platform between PC and consoles. When you take into account all players together, the Splitgate team announced they had seen over 50,000 concurrent players.

YouTube Thumbnail
YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Accept Cookies & Show   Direct Link

The developer is also now hiring for a backend engineer, so do reach out if that sounds like your thing

Right now their Linux version is in pretty good shape. Performance is seriously smooth and it looks really good. There's a couple of mouse capture issues which have been reported, so hopefully that will get fixed up. Apart from that issue, we've been incredibly impressed with the game. Adding portals to a pretty fast-paced FPS has definitely added an element that really makes it different to other shooters.

Play Splitgate free on Steam. The full proper release is on July 27.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
23 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
9 comments

officernice Jul 21, 2021
2 hours in and... it's okay. Reminds me a bit of Ballistic Overkill in terms of overall quality. The maps are okay, the UI is a bit meh. Cosmetics... meh. Outside of the portals the gameplay is just standard FPS. Not much to note with the weapons either for me. I'd still take TF2 and Quake over this. Too bad QC was borked with the latest update... One thing I think all these new FPS games need, Quake included, is a map editor and the ability to run your own servers. You need all the leeway you need to compete with other shooters.
ripper81358 Jul 21, 2021
I have tried the native linuxversion (beta) for a few days now. The game runs very well on my end. However at least on my system running an AMD Radeon RX 6700xt with the latest stable version of Mesa i encountered some technical bugs.

1. The screenresolution setting is not working showing just an empty box with nothing to select.

2. Resolutionscaling was set to 50% at the first launch so i had to adjust it to 100% manually to get the rendering up to the native resolution of my screen.

3. Vsync does not work, at least not for my 1080p@144Hz display. Activating Vsync instantly cuts my FPS down to 60 while at the same time gives me bad screentearing. I ended up using the framelimiter option instead.

Other than that the game runs flawless on X11 and Wayland with very high performance and no visible graphical glitches.
amuforatok Jul 21, 2021
I don't know why but I can't even try it. The native version gets stuck at the splash screen and with Proton (6.3 and 5.13) it doesn't even launch.
I have looked for a solution and so far it seems nobody has experienced this.
AsciiWolf Jul 21, 2021
  • Supporter Plus
I have tried the native linuxversion (beta) for a few days now. The game runs very well on my end. However at least on my system running an AMD Radeon RX 6700xt with the latest stable version of Mesa i encountered some technical bugs.

1. The screenresolution setting is not working showing just an empty box with nothing to select.

2. Resolutionscaling was set to 50% at the first launch so i had to adjust it to 100% manually to get the rendering up to the native resolution of my screen.

3. Vsync does not work, at least not for my 1080p@144Hz display. Activating Vsync instantly cuts my FPS down to 60 while at the same time gives me bad screentearing. I ended up using the framelimiter option instead.

Other than that the game runs flawless on X11 and Wayland with very high performance and no visible graphical glitches.

I had exactly the same first two issues as you. However, in my case, it got fixed when clicking the reset to default settings button. But I still ended up setting the fullscreen mode to windowed fullscreen, because this works better for all games on my system, especially when alt + tabbing between the game and other windows.

Regarding glitches, I have found only one: Water seems to have some weird memory corruption-like artifacts. I have already reported this on the game Discord.
fagnerln Jul 21, 2021
I'm really curious about this game, but I will wait the final release, I'm too busy and tired recently...

The problem of AFPS is that is too hard to find matches here in south America, people only plays CSGO/Valorant here.

2 hours in and... it's okay. Reminds me a bit of Ballistic Overkill in terms of overall quality. The maps are okay, the UI is a bit meh. Cosmetics... meh. Outside of the portals the gameplay is just standard FPS. Not much to note with the weapons either for me. I'd still take TF2 and Quake over this. Too bad QC was borked with the latest update... One thing I think all these new FPS games need, Quake included, is a map editor and the ability to run your own servers. You need all the leeway you need to compete with other shooters.

Looks like they fixed QC

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/proton-experimental-gets-a-small-update-and-fixes-quake-champions-crashes
robvv Jul 22, 2021
The only major issue that I've had is that the game is gaining popularity which means sometimes I cannot log in to the server due to overload!

Really fun when it gets going though. I seem to be mostly matched with Poles and Germans judging by the choices of username and they all seem to be very much more nimble-fingered than middle-aged me :-)

EDIT: speeling.


Last edited by robvv on 22 July 2021 at 10:30 am UTC
Julius Jul 22, 2021
Played it a bit... but those people being matched with me seem to be really bad console players or fake bots? I am by no means a good FPS player (average at best), but immediately being the best player on the first game to ever play feels... dunno fake?
drlamb Jul 24, 2021
I'm liking this game a lot but after several crashes I've resorted to playing via Proton for now.

For whatever reason (on top of the issues listed above) it seems that my mouse cursor is several centimeters off from where I'd expect. I have to "overcompensate" to accurately click menu buttons, etc. Does not happen in Proton.

This game is A LOT more polished than Ballistic Overkill.


Last edited by drlamb on 24 July 2021 at 2:14 am UTC
Whitewolfe80 Jul 25, 2021
2 hours in and... it's okay. Reminds me a bit of Ballistic Overkill in terms of overall quality. The maps are okay, the UI is a bit meh. Cosmetics... meh. Outside of the portals the gameplay is just standard FPS. Not much to note with the weapons either for me. I'd still take TF2 and Quake over this. Too bad QC was borked with the latest update... One thing I think all these new FPS games need, Quake included, is a map editor and the ability to run your own servers. You need all the leeway you need to compete with other shooters.

Am an hour in and yeah heavy ballistic overkill vibes except i liked that, this one i seem to be pretty good at it there are a ton of streamers playing it at minute so if you have ever wanted to take out a streamer on a stream now is the time apparently i took out amouranth and some streamer from korea i got messages on steam about it apparently their fans/financial backers get very salty.But gameplay wise if you love death match and some of halo odd game modes had four games of snipers and shottys back to back which is pretty straight forward open portal get close to oblivious snipers boom shotgun rinse and repeat.


Last edited by Whitewolfe80 on 25 July 2021 at 3:28 pm UTC
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.