1047 Games has laid off an undisclosed number of employees — including a lead technical sound designer, an assistant producer and several artists — weeks after its team shooter Empulse entered early access on June 24, 2026 across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

The studio, best known for Splitgate, has not publicly announced the cuts. Former employees reported the departures on LinkedIn, and Insider Gaming surfaced the posts. The exact headcount remains unclear.

How did Empulse's launch land?

Empulse debuted on Steam with a 73% "Mostly Positive" rating drawn from a modest review pool. Audience numbers were weaker: the title peaked at 2,860 concurrent players on Steam, the lowest launch figure for any 1047 Games release on record.

For context, Splitgate's 2021 summer viral moment pushed the game above 100,000 concurrent players on Steam before traffic receded sharply once the novelty wore off. Empulse's peak is orders of magnitude smaller and well below the threshold most publishers treat as a viable early-access signal. A "Mostly Positive" rating on a small sample is not a substitute for reach, and a 2,860-player ceiling suggests the title failed to convert any preview coverage or community goodwill into a sustained player base.

Early access has also become a pressure-release valve for studios uncertain about commercial reception: shipping on Steam's early-access rails lets a team gather retention data, adjust scope and stagger monetisation without committing to the marketing spend a 1.0 launch demands. That flexibility cuts both ways — it can preserve runway, but it also pushes accountability further down the timeline, and a title still sliding at 2,860 concurrent players six weeks in leaves the publisher with a narrow band of options.

Is this the first round of cuts at 1047 Games?

It is not. The studio reduced staff in June 2025, one year before the Empulse early access launch. That previous round was also undisclosed in size, though characterised at the time as small. The pattern — two cuts within twelve months, both unannounced and both tied to live-service and multiplayer projects — points to a studio operating with thinner runway than its early Splitgate-era profile suggested.

The cuts land against a wider industry contraction that has run through 2025 and into 2026, with publishers tightening portfolios around live-service titles that have not hit retention or monetisation targets. Team shooters and arena-style projects in particular have faced harder commercial barometers as player time consolidates around a smaller set of entrenched live-service hits.

What changes operationally?

The named roles — audio, production and art — are functions that directly drive content output for a live multiplayer game. When studios cut those disciplines during an early-access window, the typical consequences are:

• Slower seasonal or content drops
• Fewer maps, modes or cosmetic releases per cycle
• Thinner live-ops staffing for events, balancing patches and community operations

For Empulse specifically, those are the levers that determine whether the player base stabilises, grows or erodes. A live-service shooter that loses production capacity at this stage often faces a fork: reinvest to reignite acquisition, narrow the roadmap to a more manageable scope, or begin winding down the project.

What to watch

The first signal to track is Empulse's Steam concurrent peak over the next 30 days. An early-access shooter that cannot lift off the 2,860 mark will struggle to justify continued investment at current staffing. Watch also for any roadmap update, a Steam Next Fest reappearance, or a console patch cadence that indicates where the remaining engineering bandwidth is going. If 1047 Games does not surface a public comment within the next reporting cycle, that silence itself will be a signal about Empulse's near-term prospects.