On Friday, the CEO of developer 1047 Games and creative director on Splitgate 2, Ian Proulx, took to the stage of Summer Game Fest 2025 in an unpopular hat to declare he was sick of the stale state of FPS games. What followed was the announcement of a battle royale mode in the year of our lord 2025, as well as players discovering $80 cosmetic bundles in the portal shooter.
Proulx has now explained why prices were that high, and he blames a former Call of Duty developer.
"No excuse, of course, I should have been on this," he starts in a video posted to Twitter. "The second I got off that stage, I called Derek, our lead game designer, and I said, 'Derek, did you know we had an $80 bundle? This is news to me, like what the heck? That makes no sense.'"
Now, some of you may be alarmed if a director doesn't know how much players are being charged for bundles in his game. "Our former head of monetization, who happened to come from Call of Duty, was with us for less than a year and was very aggressive on the pricing," Proulx alleges.
Why we went from $80 to $40. pic.twitter.com/8VC7Ku1qHQJune 8, 2025
After Proulx's comments on the SGF stage about being "tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year," and the Splitgate Twitter account dunking on a current CoD developer before deleting the tweet, I would have thought he'd leave CoD out of it.
Proulx then claims that under this former CoD dev's influence, Founder's Packs were originally $100 and Battle Passes were $10, but he and and the lead game designer slashed them down to $60 and $5 respectively. Somehow, the $80 cosmetic bundle that has since been halved to $40, "slipped through the cracks."
He assures us all that "I fundamentally believe the best way, as a business, truly, to make money, is not to charge the players an egregious amount. It's to be generous, and thoughtful, and listen to feedback. [...] That is our philosophical view with Splitgate 2."
Splitgate 2 launched to "Mixed" reviews on Steam with players calling out the expensive microtransactions and the hypocrisy in criticizing Call of Duty but then adopting its same strategies and modes. So, while Proulx continues to throw shade at CoD, he has at least listened to players regarding pricing.
Proulx finishes by saying: "I'm sorry about the $80 bundle. It's crazy. It was a shock to me when I found out, and that's no excuse. But you can expect, just like we reduced prices yesterday from $80 to $40, that's going to be our philosophy going forward, is being player friendly, player first, we want this to be affordable."
In the meantime, catch up on everything that was announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.
